Construction of UNO s Information, Science, Technology and Engineering building on the Aksarben campus began in July 1997, and the building will be completed in May. Faculty and staff will move equipment and furniture in over the summer, and classes will begin in August. The new facility will combine UNO s Information Science and Technology College and the Engineering College, which is a UNL division that has an Omaha presence. Imagine a cloverleaf design with five computers around each leaf. Those computers can function as a group of five, or they can function with all the others in the room. Internet cameras are aimed at the students using the computers.
Someone can pose a problem via the Internet, and the problem is put up on monitors.
The students, individually or in teams, can manipulate what is on the screen and pose solutions. We hear from many people who have visited the prototype at the Durham Science Center that this lab will be duplicated a lot around the United States. The building will have a telecommunications lab which will be able to duplicate and test any protocol used by every telecommunications company around the world for scalability, efficiency, speed and other factors. A prototype of the lab is in the Engineering Building on campus. The transportation lab will use high tech equipment to enable students and professors to study and analyze the flow of traffic along 72 nd and Pacific streets.