The New Town Fire of 7th December 2002 destroyed the accommodation on South Bridge of approx 25% of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh, rated by the recent Research Assessment Exercise as the UKs biggest and best department for research in Computer Science.

There were no serious casualties, and thanks to the effort of the Fire Brigade, nearby student residences were saved.

Informatics at Edinburgh brings together Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science. The building at 80 South Bridge housed our Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications, our Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, and the Centre for Communications Interface Research, occupying altogether around 3000 sq m of floor space - out of a total of approx 12,000 sq m housing Informatics teaching and five more research centres, on four other sites.

The building at 80 South Bridge housed a volume of teaching and research equivalent to the entire Computer Science activity at many universities. It was used by some 300 people daily for teaching and research, and was the primary base for some 200 staff and students

It provided tutorial and laboratory space for a further 220 Junior Undergraduate Students.

We have lost over 150 workstations, a cluster of powerful servers, and associated infrastructure.

We have also lost the Artificial Intelligence Library - a collection of AI literature unique in the world, an irreplaceable archive accumulated over the 40 years of Edinburgh's leadership in the field, since its beginning in the 1960s.

Although we have lost this archival collection, and many researchers have lost their personal archives, most of our current research data is stored electronically. We have recently rolled out a state of the art distributed computing environment, and, in this respect at least, we are well placed for disaster recovery.

The loss of the 80 South Bridge building of the School of Informatics in the fire of 7th December will have serious short term impact on the ability of the School to carry on its teaching and research. The building accounts for around 25% of the overall space occupied by the School. In the short term this fire will:

The immediate disruption to our computing and administrative systems will be dealt with by the end of this week and by the same time a robust short-term plan for alternative accommodation will be in place to allow us to deliver the current research and teaching programme of the School in the New Year.

Currently we have major plans for expansion in a range of critical research areas including speech and language, neuroscience, bioinformatics and a programme of research in databases and knowledge management that complements the work of the National e-Science Centre. To maintain this momentum we will require new temporary space to grow into.

The disaster poses major challenges to these medium term goals. We are growing very rapidly, both in research volume and postgraduate numbers. Dispersal of our activity and the lack of accommodation for growth could have a very severe impact on our ability to continue developing our role as a leading international centre, and a key component of the knowledge economy in Scotland.

The good news is that the University has already started planning work for a purpose-built Informatics Centre for Communication, Cognition and Computation, which will draw all the activity in Informatics at Edinburgh - research and teaching, in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science - together under one roof. It is imperative that we now grasp the opportunity to accelerate these plans.


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