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Over at Hyde Park

Something interesting is happening over at the University of Chicago.

Mike Franklin is a premier academic database researcher and was a longtime UC Berkeley CS Division stalwart. Franklin moved to the University of Chicago last year.

As part of a plan to greatly increase the scale, scope and impact of computer science research and education across the University community, the University of Chicago has appointed prominent data science scholar Michael Franklin to chair its Department of Computer Science and to serve as senior advisor to the provost on computation and data science.

Ben Y. Zhao is a UC Berkeley CS Division alum, well-regarded systems researcher, and formerly at UC Santa Barbara. He just moved over to the University of Chicago this month.

I am Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at University of Chicago. Prior to joining UChicago, I was a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. My research covers a range of topics from large-distributed networks and systems, HCI, security and privacy, and wireless / mobile systems, mostly from a data-driven perspective. My current projects are focused on three areas: data-driven models of user behavior/interactions, security of online and mobile communities, and wireless systems and protocols. My work targets a range of top conferences, including WWW/IMC, Mobicom/SIGCOMM/NSDI, UsenixSecurity/NDSS/S&P, CHI/CSCW.

Luis Bettencourt, of the Santa Fe Institute, applies techniques from the complex systems community to the study of urban dynamics. He just joined up with the U of C, although he’ll maintain an appointment as external faculty to SFI.

Luis M. Bettencourt, a leading researcher in urban science and complex systems, has been appointed the inaugural Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago.

… In his research, Bettencourt uses the growing availability of data worldwide on topics ranging from transportation to housing to understand cities in quantitative and predictive ways. He is dedicated to creating new urban theory to explain how cities thrive and the challenges they face, based on the integration of ideas from urban disciplines such as geography, economics and sociology with methodologies from the natural and computational sciences. He also focuses on understanding the role of innovation and technological change as a driver of economic growth and human development in cities, across the world and throughout history. One of his most influential research projects has helped explain the systematic association between the size of urban areas and higher rates of economic productivity and innovation, as well as higher costs of living and violent crime.

I don’t know if these are coordinated events and I haven’t dug into any other recent appointments. Even if not, this is a kernel of talent that a world class university can build around for incredible outcomes. Also, with Northwestern University targeting a big expansion of the Computer Science program, a nice, metropolitan, bi-polar axis of computing research could emerge.

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