University of Washington President Robert Jones wants to expand computer science access for undergraduates and build new public-private partnerships to tackle society’s grand challenges — and he has concrete ideas on how to make that happen.
More than 100 days into his tenure as the UW’s 34th president, Jones is also working to dispel two persistent myths: that it’s nearly impossible to get into the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and that AI is taking everyone’s jobs.
This fall, the Allen School — a top tech program nationally — accepted 37% of the direct applicants from Washington state high schools, though out-of-state admissions is only 4%. “We actually accept many more students than the general public believes,” Jones said in an interview this week with GeekWire.
As to the AI job apocalypse? “That’s an overblown fear,” Jones said. AI is a “critically important tool to have in your tool chest to be more effective in the future.”
Drawing on his experience leading the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Jones wants to give a bigger slice of the UW’s 45,000 undergraduates access to computer science courses — even if they’re in unrelated degree programs.
The idea is modeled on the groundbreaking “CS + X” initiative that he helped expand during his past presidency in Illinois. The program created tech-infused studies in 17 degree programs including advertising, astronomy, economics, music, philosophy and physics.
In Illinois, CS + X launched in crop sciences more than a decade ago because agricultural tech was, and continues to be, one of the fastest growing sectors in the state. Jones himself began his career as a professor in plant physiology and became an international authority in the field.
“AI is just an amazing tool, and we’re doing work here to try to make sure that our students are getting as comprehensive an education as possible,” Jones said. Bolstering a graduate’s knowledge of computer science and artificial intelligence in addition to their focus area makes them “much more employable.”
A $10 million gift announced Tuesday from Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi and his wife, Lisa Simonyi, will help facilitate the integration of AI into education and research across the university through the newly formed AI@UW initiative.
AI@UW, which includes a new Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence position, will help the UW maintain its “strategic advantage” as an AI leader, Jones said. It’s also an example of the sort of public-private collaborations he’d like to foster.
“Radical partnerships”
Jones envisions expanding what he calls “radical partnerships” — building diverse coalitions across geographies, institutions and sectors to tackle problems “that are too big for any one entity to solve alone.”
The collaborations can bring together both expertise and funding. The university faces a difficult financial landscape as Washington state’s revenue forecast continues to weaken, drawing down an already strained budget. Add to that ongoing worries about funding cuts to federal research programs that the UW heavily relies upon.
Jones pointed to the university’s long-running WWAMI program, which serves medical students from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho who earn their degrees at the UW and return to their communities to practice medicine, as a prime example of the radical partnership approach.
“I’ve done about three or four of these over the last 10 years,” he said, “and they’re just amazing ways to bring people together and to think about doing research in a different, in a much more collaborative, much more impactful way than we’ve ever thought about.”
The strategy is particularly suited to AI, quantum computing or other massive technological challenges, he said. Jones was involved in partnerships with the University of Chicago to bolster quantum science research in Illinois and a human biology collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago.
In future collaborations in his new role, Jones is eager to work “seamlessly” with the region’s tech sector, leveraging the fact that UW helped create an ecosystem that includes giants like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as hundreds of smaller companies. More than 110 UW spinoffs currently operate in the state, according to the university’s CoMotion program, which supports entrepreneurship.
“What we have to do more of is working together to fund and to create the next big idea that’s going to be transformative,” Jones said, “not only for the state of Washington, but for the nation and the world.”
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