UT System approves new school focused on computing, AI

A school groups parts of campus with a unified academic focus and operates with more visibility and resources than a department. UT has 18 schools and colleges in total, including a School of Law, School of Architecture and a School of Nursing. 

At a time when AI is rapidly evolving and challenging employers and educators, the new school will allow UT to more deeply explore artificial intelligence’s use for public benefit, not corporate interests. 

David Vanden Bout, dean of the College of Natural Science, said in an interview that his college will aim to add 50 faculty in five years while growing student opportunities for research and classes.

“Bridging those groups together, I think we have the opportunity to ensure that all of our technology advances are aimed in the right direction,” Vanden Bout said. “That’s a huge role and opportunity for us to play as a public university.”

The new school will increase opportunities for students across colleges by creating new courses in AI literacy and allowing more students to enroll in each major.

The new Department of Information — which previously operated as a school — will retain its degree programs and also add new faculty, Vanden Bout said. The information studies focus will add an important “human element” to the college’s artificial intelligence research, and the new structure will allow for easier collaboration between the fields.

“Bringing in information in the way that we use computing and organize information in the world — the real human aspects of computing, we get that human element that’s often missing in computer science” Vanden Bout said.

UT’s goal is to eventually have the School of Computing stand on its own, but the placement under the College of Natural Sciences will allow for easy sharing of resources in the meantime, the dean said. The School of Information is far smaller than the college and has fewer students than the Computer Science department, which means it would have been difficult to fold the departments under the school, he said.

“These are very popular majors that we want to ensure we’re providing ample opportunities,” Vanden Bout said. “While we are bringing some of those units together under this umbrella in (the College of Natural Sciences), computing and computing power is really driving lots of things across campus.”