Vision
ICT’s vision is to achieve international prominence through interdisciplinary research in the targeted areas of Smart Environments and Enabling Discovery, two fields motivated by challenging societal problems. UB is already well-positioned to achieve prominence in ICT due to the presence of nationally recognized centers such as CCR, CEDAR, CEISARE and NCGIA and CVA.
Advances in Information and Computing Technologies (ICT) are critical to progress in almost every field of human endeavor. In the digital society of 2020 these technologies will be embedded into everyday objects and blend into our environment, transforming the way we communicate, access information, manage resources, and build advanced systems. Adaptive and intuitive interfaces will mediate between humans and computers to make their interaction natural and effortless. At the same time, the ubiquitous grid of ultra high-end computing and storage systems together with advanced decision-making, modeling and simulations methodologies will enable breakthroughs in fields as diverse as economics, finance, engineering, life sciences, and medicine. Information and computing technologies will also foster socio-economic development by enabling widespread access to education and services.
Realizing these goals requires shifting the traditional emphasis on discipline-centric research in computer and information science, engineering, or management to a holistic interdisciplinary one. UB has the ICT infrastructure and strategic strengths to build an extraordinary community for creating new knowledge about challenging societal applications as well as the technologies needed to provide solutions to those challenges. It is ideally positioned to create new methods and models to study and transform the structure, behavior, and interactions of both natural and engineered systems. Success in these endeavors will forge collaborations between faculty in the constituent strategic strength areas, and draw from all ICT related strengths on campus.
