2025-26 Frederick L. Hovde Distinguished Lecturer

Carla E. Brodley

Dean of inclusive Computing and founding Executive Director of the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) at Northeastern University

 

Creating and Implementing Interdisciplinary Majors: A Nine University Case Study in CS+X

Abstract

Interdisciplinary computing majors (often called CS+X), combine Computer Science (CS) with a non-computing discipline into a single degree. While this has been a topic of discussion for 20+ years in CS education, few universities offer interdisciplinary computing majors (ICMs) today. Notable exceptions are Northeastern University and UIUC with 62 and 17 ICMs respectively. With the goal of trying to understand this paradox, we set out to study what it takes to create and implement ICMs and to identify institutional barriers. This talk will describe a multi-year initiative at seven large, public U.S. universities that have recently launched ICMs. We will also include an analysis of UIUC and Northeastern who have already established programs. Synthesizing experience across institutions, we examine how universities identify partner disciplines, how they develop the degree requirements, how they structure capstone and integrative courses, and how they navigate governance, university culture/budget model, advising, and priority registration challenges. Our contributions are two fold: 1) we demonstrate that ICMs are viable in a variety of university contexts and 2) we provide the practical considerations in developing these degrees. We note that the lessons learned in creating ICMs generalize to degrees combining any two fields.

Biography

Carla E. Brodley is the dean of inclusive computing and the founding executive director of the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) at Northeastern University. She is the dean emeritus of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

A $70 million initiative, the CIC funds and advises universities in the United States to remove institutional barriers to the discovery, access, and retention of students in computing. In this role, Brodley works with presidents, provosts, deans, chairs, and faculty at more than 100 universities, all while raising money from the government and philanthropists.

Previously, Brodley served as dean of Khoury College (2014–21) and, as the sole dean appointed to the Northeastern University Presidential Cabinet, served as a senior advisor to Northeastern President Joseph Aoun (2019–21). Before joining Northeastern, Brodley was a professor in the Department of Computer Science (2004–14) and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Tufts Medical Center (2011–14), as well as chair of the Department of Computer Science (2010–13) at Tufts University. Before joining Tufts, she was on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University (1994–2004).

Brodley’s interdisciplinary machine learning research has led to advances not only in computer science, but also in remote sensing, neuroscience, digital libraries, astrophysics, content- based image retrieval of medical images, computational biology, chemistry, evidence-based medicine, and predictive medicine. As a result of this impact, Brodley was made a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Brodley's many leadership positions include program co-chair of the International Conference on Machine Learning, co-chair of AAAI, and associate editor of Machine Learning, the Journal of AI Research, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. She also served on the Defense Science Study Group, the board of the International Machine Learning Society, the AAAI Council, the executive committee of the Northeast Big Data Hub, DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Board, the advisory committee for the NSF’s CISE Directorate, the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication and the Mass Technology Leadership Council. Currently, Brodley serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of the Computing Research Association, the Steering Committee of Stanford’s AI Index, and as Vice-Chair of the Jackson Laboratory Board of Trustees.