www.bu.edu/hic
In today’s environment of pervasive communications, sensors and data acquisition, computing has become an indispensable “third leg” of discovery, along with theory and experimentation. The prevalence and ubiquity of computing raises the question of how to most effectively foster and intensify synergies in computational research and education in academia. Traditional academic departments, based on a focused disciplinary approach can neither capture the truly interdisciplinary nature of computational research, nor take full advantage of the synergies between different ways of approaching related complex problems by researchers in different computing and computational disciplines.
Thanks to a generous gift from Alumnus and Trustee Bahaa Hariri, Boston University is poised to tackle these challenges by adopting an institutional culture that recognizes the power of computing in research and education.
The mission of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering is organized around four sets of goals:
- Leading the University’s research and serving as an incubator for new ideas and collaborations across the computing and computational sciences
- Enabling computational research collaboration with other institutions and industrial partners, both nationally and internationally
- Organizing the intellectual capital and coordinating efforts and initiatives targeting graduate education and training in computational methods
- Leading programs that promote quantitative and computational literacy for undergraduate and K-12 students and for society at large