The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing stands at the forefront of addressing the unprecedented opportunities and challenges in our digital era. This innovative institution is transforming academia through three fundamental pillars: accelerating the evolution of computer science and artificial intelligence education programs; fostering interdisciplinary collaborations between computing and other fields; and championing the social and ethical responsibilities of computing by integrating technological approaches with insights from social sciences and humanities.
Since his appointment in August 2019, Daniel Huttenlocher, the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, has collaborated with numerous stakeholders to design the college's foundational structure. Building upon the College of Computing Task Force Working Group reports and valuable feedback from the MIT community, this structure has evolved through iterative planning processes, culminating in a comprehensive 26-page framework. This document outlines the academic organization designed to advance the college's mission through enhanced coordination of existing computing programs, strengthened cross-disciplinary computing collaborations, and the development of new initiatives focused particularly on the social and ethical responsibilities of computing.
"The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing represents both a consolidation of MIT's existing computing excellence and a bold step toward creating essential new cross-cutting educational and research programs," explains Huttenlocher. "For established programs, the college facilitates coordination and manages growth in critical areas such as computer science, artificial intelligence, data systems and society, and operations research, while also strengthening interdisciplinary computing initiatives like computational science and engineering. In emerging domains, the college is establishing cross-cutting platforms for examining the social and ethical responsibilities of computing, advancing multi-departmental computing education, and incubating innovative interdisciplinary computing activities."
The following established departments, institutes, labs, and centers now constitute integral parts of the college:
With this foundational structure established, Huttenlocher, the college leadership team, and leaders of affiliated academic units are actively advancing curricular and programmatic development in collaboration with all five schools. Key initiatives include the launch of the Common Ground for Computing Education and the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC). Though still in early planning stages, these programs exemplify the college's commitment to transcending traditional boundaries and engaging multiple departments throughout MIT. Additional programs will be introduced as the college continues to evolve.
"The college functions as an Institute-wide entity, working collaboratively across all five schools," notes Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who served on the task force steering committee. "Its continued growth and focus depend significantly on input from our MIT community, a process initiated over a year ago. I'm delighted that Dean Huttenlocher and the college leadership team have actively engaged our community in collaborative discussions about the college's future direction."
Through these organizational changes, students, faculty, and staff within these units become college members, sometimes jointly with a school, as will those participating in new cross-cutting SERC and Common Ground activities. "A question we frequently receive," Huttenlocher mentions, "concerns how to apply to the college. Following MIT's established procedures, undergraduate admissions are centrally managed, while graduate admissions are handled by individual departments or graduate programs."
Advancing Computing Education and Research
Despite computing's unprecedented growth, substantial unmet demand for expertise persists. Academic institutions worldwide face oversubscribed computer science programs and the constant challenge of keeping pace with rapidly evolving content at both graduate and undergraduate levels.
According to Huttenlocher, computing fields are evolving at a pace that exceeds current academic structures' capacity to adapt. "As academics, we take pride in generating new knowledge, but academic institutions themselves don't change quickly. The rise of AI represents perhaps the most significant recent example of this challenge, particularly considering that approximately 40 percent of MIT undergraduates major in computer science, despite the fact that computer science faculty represent only 7 percent of MIT's total faculty."
To address this demand, MIT is expanding its academic capacity in computing and AI through 50 new faculty positions—25 dedicated to core computing areas in CS, AI, and related fields, and 25 shared jointly with other departments. Active recruitment is underway for core faculty in CS and AI+D, as well as for joint faculty positions with MIT Philosophy, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and several interdisciplinary institutes.
The new shared faculty searches will primarily employ a "cluster" approach to build capacity in critical computing areas that span disciplines, departments, and schools. Huttenlocher, the provost, and the five school deans will identify themes based on departmental input to facilitate recruitment during the upcoming academic year.
Fostering Interdisciplinary Computing Collaborations
Building on MIT's history of strong faculty participation in interdepartmental labs, centers, and initiatives, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing offers various membership categories based on cross-cutting research, teaching, or external engagement activities. While computing influences intellectual inquiry across nearly every discipline, Huttenlocher emphasizes that "this influence is bidirectional." He notes that existing collaborations across various schools and departments, such as MIT Digital Humanities, along with opportunities for new partnerships, are essential to the college's mission because "just as computing is transforming disciplinary thinking, disciplines are reshaping how people approach computing."
Under the guidance of Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of academics and EECS department head, the college is developing the Common Ground for Computing Education—an interdepartmental teaching collaborative designed to facilitate computing course offerings and coordinate computing-related curricula across academic units.
This collaborative aims to create opportunities for faculty across departments to work together, including co-teaching courses, establishing new undergraduate majors or minors such as in AI+D, and facilitating undergraduate blended degrees like 6-14 (Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science), 6-9 (Computation and Cognition), 11-6 (Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science), 18-C (Mathematics with Computer Science), and others.
"It's exciting to bring together different computing areas with their methodological and substantive commonalities and differences around one table," says Ozdaglar. "MIT faculty want to collaborate on computing topics, but they're increasingly overwhelmed with teaching assignments and other obligations. I believe the college will enable the types of interactions necessary to foster new ideas."
Considering the impact on student experience, Ozdaglar anticipates that the college will help students navigate MIT's computing landscape more effectively by creating clearer pathways. She also observes that many students have passions beyond computer science but recognize the need to master computing techniques and methodologies to pursue other interests, whether in political science, economics, or urban science. "The college's vision is to educate students who are fluent in computation while creatively applying computing methods to the questions and approaches of their primary domains of interest," she explains.
For Daniela Rus, deputy dean of research and director of CSAIL, developing research programs "that bring together MIT faculty and students from different units to advance computing and improve the world through technology" represents a top priority. She points to the recent launch of the MIT Air Force AI Innovation Accelerator, a collaboration between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the U.S. Air Force focused on AI, as an example of research initiatives the college can facilitate.
"As humanity works to solve problems ranging from climate change to curing disease, addressing inequality, ensuring sustainability, and eliminating poverty, computing opens doors to powerful new solutions," says Rus. "With the MIT Schwarzman College as our foundation, I believe MIT will lead the way in developing these solutions. Our scholars are establishing theoretical foundations of computing and applying these foundations to transformative ideas in computing and across disciplines."
Cultivating Responsible Computing Practices
A critically important cross-cutting initiative is the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), designed to foster responsible "habits of mind and action" among those who create and deploy computing technologies, and to develop technologies that serve the public interest.
"The establishment of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing presents an extraordinary opportunity for the MIT community to address today's most consequential questions in ways that serve the common good," states Melissa Nobles, professor of political science, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and co-chair of the Task Force Working Group on Social Implications and Responsibilities of Computing.
"As AI and other advanced technologies become increasingly ubiquitous in their influence and impact, touching nearly every aspect of life, we've recognized the growing need to consciously align powerful new technologies with core human values—integrating consideration of societal and ethical implications into the earliest stages of technology development. This means asking critical questions about every new technology and tool: Who will benefit? What are the potential ecological and social costs? Will this technology amplify or diminish human accomplishments in justice, democracy, and personal privacy?"
"As we shape the college, we envision an MIT culture where all community members are equipped and encouraged to consider these implications. In this endeavor, MIT's humanistic disciplines will serve as essential resources for research, insight, and discernment. We also see opportunities for advanced technologies to help address political, economic, and social challenges affecting our world by integrating technology with humanistic analysis of complex civilizational issues—including climate change, the future of work, and poverty, problems that require collaborative problem-solving approaches. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that human survival may depend on our ability to solve these problems through collective intelligence, designing approaches that draw upon the full spectrum of human knowledge."
Julie Shah, an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and head of the Interactive Robotics Group at CSAIL, who co-chaired the working group with Nobles and now serves on the college leadership, adds that "traditional technologists aren't trained to pause and envision the potential futures of how technology can and will be used. This means we need to develop new approaches to training our students and ourselves, forming new habits of mind and action that incorporate these potential futures into our design processes."
The associate deans of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Shah and David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics, are designing a systemic framework for SERC that will influence computing education and research at MIT while also informing policy and practice in government and industry. Currently developing activities include multidisciplinary curricula integrated into traditional computing and AI courses at all instructional levels, commissioned and curated modular case studies available through MIT's open access channels, active learning projects, cross-disciplinary monthly convenings, public forums, and more.
"Much of our thinking about SERC components focuses on building capacity with existing Institute resources as a crucial first step," Kaiser notes. "This means finding ways to encourage interactions that might differ from familiar patterns, because while I believe there are many shared goals within the MIT community, the mechanisms aren't quite aligned yet. We want to further support collaborations that might cross boundaries that haven't traditionally seen much interaction."
The Journey Continues
While excited about the progress achieved thus far, Huttenlocher acknowledges that the college's organizational structure will continue to evolve. "We're at the very beginning of this journey, building upon tremendous existing excellence at MIT while addressing clear needs and opportunities. However, the landscape is changing rapidly, and the college remains very much a work in progress."
The college has additional initiatives in planning stages, including the Center for Advanced Studies of Computing, which will host fellows from within and beyond MIT for semester- or year-long project-oriented programs in focused topic areas that could seed new research, scholarly, educational, or policy work. Furthermore, Huttenlocher plans to launch a search for an assistant or associate dean of equity and inclusion once the Institute Community and Equity Officer is in place, focusing on enhancing and creating programs and activities to broaden participation in computing classes and degree programs, increase diversity among top faculty candidates in computing fields, and ensure diverse candidate slates in faculty searches and graduate admissions processes.
"The typical academic approach would be to wait until the path forward is completely clear, but that would be a mistake. We'll learn by trying and by remaining flexible. This may reflect a more general characteristic of the new era we're entering," Huttenlocher observes. "We don't know exactly what this will look like years from now, but it will be substantially different, and MIT will be helping shape that future."
The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will host a community forum on Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 2 p.m. in Room 10-250. MIT community members are welcome to attend to learn more about the college's initial organizational structure.
