Sam Keene, professor of electrical engineering and the inaugural John and Mary Manuck Professor of Design, has been named chair of The Cooper Union's new Computer Science (CS) Program. Keene is extremely active in campus life, having served as president of the Faculty Student Senate, co-chair of the Diversity and Equity Task Force and president of The Cooper Union Federation of College Teachers. Professor Keene has also cultivated collaborations with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Temple University Hospital, and various New York City nonprofits to create hands-on opportunities for Cooper students. Students across disciplines have worked with Professor Keene in courses he's developed around the intersection of computation, machine learning, and creative work, including Generative Algorithms for Art and Architecture and Data Science Projects for Social Good.

He's looking forward to spearheading a new department in a field with such pressing challenges: How can the biases of generative algorithms be studied and mitigated? How do we balance the opportunities created by technologies like generative machine learning or blockchain with the environmental costs incurred due to the sheer volume of computational resources required? Professor Keene sees the creation of this CS program—which will offer a bachelor of science degree, with the first students admitted for the 2025-2026 academic year—as "an incredible opportunity for our institution to embody our mission."

We asked Professor Keene to weigh in on some of his plans for the new department.

The new computer science program puts emphasis on collaborative education. Could you talk about will mean for students?

We’re achieving collaborative education in a few ways. One is how, like all degrees at Cooper, we have small class sizes and close interaction with faculty, opportunities for undergraduate research, and other advantages that come with a small school. The other aspect unique to the CS program is a planned formal mechanism for upperclass students to mentor first-year students. We will teach them how to mentor the freshmen in the first-year programming sequence they'll be taking. The mentors will learn leadership skills and team management skills while functioning as TAs and showing students how to debug code.

You currently hold the Manuck Professorship, which is designed to foster innovation between Cooper's schools and disciplines. Will the CS program offer any interdisciplinary opportunities to students?

It is my hope that the CS department will become an interdisciplinary resource for the entire school. Computation impacts all fields that The Cooper Union is active in, including classical engineering applications, generative art, design tools, and digital humanities. Opportunities abound for interdisciplinary opportunities via the CS program, and my hope is it will be a catalyst across the institution. As far as the Manuck Professorship, over the next couple of years while I still hold it, I plan to use those funds to continue exploring how we can use generative machine learning to develop novel ways to create and design.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), of course, has been prominently featured in the news as a development concurrently revolutionary and frightening. How will questions of ethics be brought into the curriculum?

Ethics are embedded into the curriculum at many points. All students will take Engineering Design and Problem Solving (EID 101) as well as complete a capstone project, both of which have ethics components. We additionally have a dedicated, mandatory course on Ethics of Computer Science. A couple of the electives currently offered, such as the Data Science for Social Good, Generative Algorithms for Art and Architecture, Philosophy of AI, also grapple with many ethical questions related to AI. I’ve also been discussing with Demetrius Eudell, vice president of academic affairs, how we can develop programming around AI and its impact on democracy.