Robert L. Constable has been reappointed for a second five-year term as dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Constable became the first dean of the new faculty unit when it was created in the fall of 1999. Previously he had been chair of the Department of Computer Science.

"Under Dean Constable, the Faculty of Computing and Information Science has more than fulfilled its original mission of making computation and information sciences available to every discipline on campus," said Cornell Provost Biddy Martin in announcing the reappointment. "Bob's intellectual curiosity and collaborative spirit have made a mark across the campus. The faculty's imagination and expertise have combined to create new research tools and opportunities and to encourage previously unforeseen uses of computing, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We look forward to the continued success of the faculty under Bob's leadership."

The Faculty of Computing and Information Science, familiarly referred to as CIS, is an interdisciplinary program that, as Constable describes it, fits "sideways" over all the colleges and departments of the university. It was created in 1999 in response to the report of a university task force that concluded, "Cornell University should undertake to become an institution where anyone can bring ideas from computing and information science to bear on any discipline." CIS now comprises 53 faculty members, including many newly hired to expand the CIS program. All hold joint appointments in CIS and some other academic department. CIS also draws on the talents of several other faculty members to teach courses or support research.

"That's the nature of computation today," Constable explained. "It's deeply involved with almost every discipline, and our job has been to recruit world-class professors into many departments and give them a second home in CIS. Since all our appointments are made with another college, I have to interact with all the other deans, and it's been a privilege to work with them. They're a great group."

CIS, located in the Information Science building at 301 College Ave, has created two new undergraduate majors -- in computational biology and information science and runs the tri-institutional graduate program in computational molecular biology in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medical College, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and The Rockefeller University. In addition, CIS faculty members teach individual courses in a number of departments, such as a course in e-commerce in the Johnson Graduate School of Management, a course in tools for computational science, and courses in computer animation and media arts. And CIS has introduced a new sequence of programming courses in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

CIS also has launched a research program in information networks, studying very large information resources like the World Wide Web and the Cornell-based physics preprint ArXiv and Legal Information Institute, and it oversees two research institutes: the Information Assurance Institute and the Intelligent Information Systems Institute. In addition it houses, in the Information Science building, the Cornell project that provides core systems integration for the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library.

In the future, Constable said, CIS will introduce another major in digital arts and graphics, involving at least the colleges of Arts and Sciences and Architecture, Art and Planning, and a graduate program in computational science and engineering.

"It's been an exciting ride," Constable said. "I'm looking forward to continuing and working with the new administration under President Jeffrey Lehman, who has expressed special interest in the role of computing in education and research."