President Mark Yudof identified digital technology as one of five key areas essential to the future strength of the University and the Minnesota economy. As part of the initiative to strengthen the University in this area, the Digital Technology Center was established. Its purpose is to foster and support interdisciplinary research that relies on computers in one form or another. The DTC also exists to foster partnerships between University researchers in the digital technology area and the private sector.

The home for the Digital Technology Center is the newly renovated Walter Library, which also contains the Science and Engineering Library and the Institute of Technology Dean's Office. The Minnesota Supercom-puting Institute and the Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering have also moved to Walter Library.

The faculty members who are affiliated with the DTC also have appointments in established departments. The DTC currently has three chaired positions open, the ADC Telecommunications chairs. The people who fill these positions will have appointments in either the Department of Computer Science and Engineering or the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The DTC faculty members all have offices in Walter and many also have space for labs and graduate students so that interdisciplinary work can be fostered by proximity. Not surprisingly, a large number of the faculty members of the CS&E Department are affiliated with the DTC. This spring has seen a lot of activity as research groups have moved to their new quarters over Church Street and across the Mall.

Eleven CS&E faculty members will have offices in the Walter Library in the Digital Technology Center. The three graphics faculty, Baoquan Chen, Victoria Interrante, and Gary Meyer are moving their lab and students. Others moving include David Du and Zhi-Li Zhang in networks, Jon Weissman in distributed systems, Wei-Chung Hsu in run-time optimization, George Karypis and John Carlis who both have strong interests in bio-informatics, and Maria Gini and Nikos Papanikolopoulos in robotics. (See the CS&E department Web page for more information about the research interests of these faculty.)

-Bobbie Othmer