The future firmly in sight
1995 – 2004
The original server running the Google algorithm developed by engineering graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made up of ten 4-gigabyte disk drives, encased in toy building blocks, translucent plastic, and packing tape, 1996. This combined 40 GB of storage was considerably larger than what was required of most student projects at the time. It is now on display in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
by Andrew Myers
A lot of the really interesting research is interdisciplinary. Having meeting places is important. . . . It’s a magical opportunity for things to happen.
— Dean James Plummer, 1999
1995 – 2004
The eighth decade of Stanford Engineering opened amid a global revolution in communication technology and with a new century on the horizon. The ten years ahead would see groundbreaking research, expanding and evolving departments, and growing interest in Stanford Engineering’s signature leadership in entrepreneurship, innovation in engineering education, and broadening interdisciplinary research programs.
In 1995, five School of Engineering departments ranked number one in a peer survey compiled by the National Research Council in an exhaustive 740-page report. John Hennessy, then the chair of the top-ranked Department of Computer Science, noted that his field was “moving very fast,” making it easier for him to establish a stellar reputation for Stanford by staying at the forefront. Ronald Hanson, the chair of mechanical engineering, attributed his department’s success to its continued excellence in basic research.(1)
The Stanford Technology Ventures Program
That same year, in his final year as dean, James Gibbons established the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) within the Department of Management Science and Engineering. STVP created programs in all three areas of education, research, and outreach. One of its most popular courses is still the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series, which has featured many Silicon Valley and global technology luminaries over the years.
The objective of STVP, Gibbons recalled, was “to teach entrepreneurship . . . to help people understand what entrepreneurship was. Not trying to make them entrepreneurs.”(2) By connecting students with companies and the people who founded them, the program could “help people to understand technology ventures, how they fail, what kind of personalities it takes, what we know about success and failure.”(3) STVP would lead significant research studies exploring, for example, the impact of different funding sources on start-ups in the medical devices industry, the effects of public policy on entrepreneurship in China, and the relative successes of firms in the solar industry.(4)
Exterior view of the William Hewlett Teaching Center, 2000. It was one of four new buildings constructed as part of the Near West Campus project, which opened in 1999. Funded primarily by William Hewlett and David Packard, it houses educational resources, including auditoriums and lecture halls. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
Stanford Center for Professional Development
Led by executive director Andy DiPaolo, the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) began operations in 1995, incorporating the Stanford Instructional Television Network (SITN). SCPD offered professional and executive education through noncredit courses, workshops, and conferences using a variety of cutting-edge instructional technologies delivered to thousands of working engineers at companies like IBM and Microsoft.(5)
In 1998, through SCPD, the School of Engineering was the first Stanford school to offer a completely online advanced degree program in electrical engineering.(6) The program was targeted to working professionals—engineers, computer scientists, and technology Managers—and offered thirty courses in electrical engineering, all online. Professors could deliver lectures, distribute handouts, notes, and exams, and interact with students, all electronically. “In the industrial age we went to school. In the communication age the school comes to us,” said DiPaolo.(7) In 2024, SCPD was renamed the Stanford Engineering Center for Global and Online Education.
Oussama Khatib, then associate professor of computer science, demonstrating his human-like robots, 1996. Dubbed Romeo and Juliet, the robots were designed and built to provide humans with semiautonomous assistance. They could perform tasks such as washing windows, picking books off shelves, erasing whiteboards, and dusting furniture. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
Humanizing robotics
Work in robotics pushed into new frontiers in 1995 as Oussama Khatib, a professor of computer science and one of the world’s foremost authorities on robotics, developed a semiautonomous robotic assistant capable of everyday human tasks in so-called unstructured environments. “The development of robots for unstructured environments is much more challenging because these robots cannot simply be pre-programmed,” Khatib said. Khatib built not one but two human-like robots, dubbed Romeo and Juliet and fitted with sensor-based reactions. They could “dance” with a human counterpart, erase a chalkboard, clear a table, or lift heavy objects.(8)
A fateful friendship
In the summer of 1995, graduate student Sergey Brin was leading a campus tour for prospective graduate students when he met Larry Page. When he started classes a few months later, Page began studying the burgeoning World Wide Web; its network of nodes and connecting links intrigued his mathematical mind.
Stanford President John Hennessy, alumni Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and computer science Professor Donald Knuth at a gathering on campus to celebrate Google, April 2005. | School of Engineering.
Soon, Page and Brin were collaborating on an algorithm, known as Back-Rub, that could trace the Web’s network of links backward to learn which pages were linking to any given page on the Web. The number and quality of those “backlinks” might indicate the value of the page they were all linking to. That seemingly simple hypothesis laid the foundation for the company Google. Page and Brin’s original algorithm was expanded and refined to become PageRank, named for both its function and for Page himself.
“We had a querying tool,” Page said, that “gave you a good overall ranking of pages” in the query results. Google was first released on the Stanford website in August 1996, just a year after Page and Brin met.(9)
The new Gates building
In 1996, Microsoft Corporation Chairman Bill Gates dedicated the new William Gates Computer Science Building, for which he personally donated $6 million, a gift supplemented by Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and J. Erik Jonsson of Texas Instruments. The 150,000-square-foot building included space for historical exhibits showcasing Stanford’s role in the history of computing, and became home to 550 faculty, staff, and students, uniting the Department of Computer Science, which had been scattered across eight different sites on campus.(10)
“It’s fantastic to see this building and how it’s come together so well,” Gates said at the dedication ceremony. It would be “up to the students” to determine what is done with the technology they could develop there, he added.(11)
Exterior view of the William Gates Computer Science Building, 2022. When it was completed in 1996, the building housed facilities for research and education and united the previously dispersed Computer Science Department. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
A robot demonstration at the dedication of the William Gates Computer Science Building, 1996. Attendees included (from left in front row) Stanford President Gerhard Casper, professor of computer science Oussama Khatib, William Hewlett (seated), Bill and Melinda Gates, and David Packard (seated). In addition to facilities that support research and education, the building houses exhibits containing historical equipment and documents focusing on Stanford’s role in the history of computing. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
John Hennessy, Bill Gates, and Jim Gibbons outside the William Gates Computer Science Building during its dedication, 1996. Hennessy was dean of the school at this time, Gates was the major donor for the building, and Gibbons, former dean, was serving as special counsel to the president and provost on industry relations. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
A program and place for collaboration
With a historic pledge from former engineering professor, Silicon Graphics founder, and Internet pioneer James Clark, the school in 1999 began to collaborate on the plan for a new building to house the university’s Bio-X program, whose mission was to formalize interdisciplinary research related to biology. Clark noted that his gift had been inspired by seeing Stanford researchers turn embryonic chicken cells into working heart cells. “I saw a new future for medicine and biology,” Clark wrote. “I believe research that uses [stem cells] is vital to the future of medicine.”(12)
Clark’s gift of $90 million for Bio-X was instrumental in the construction of the program’s new building. Situated between the Medical School and the School of Engineering, the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences is a physical and symbolic link between the two schools and the rest of campus.
New deans
In late 1995, Dean James Gibbons transitioned into the role of special counsel to the president and provost on industry relations.(13) After an extensive national search that included at least seventy nominations, the university announced that John Hennessy, professor of computer science, would be the new dean.
“I spent a lot of time talking to Jim Gibbons about it, who gave me this very sage piece of advice. He said, ‘Take this job not because you like the emoluments of the office or anything else, but because you want to serve the faculty and students at Stanford.’ . . . I enjoyed that. And I’m an intellectually curious person, so it gave me a much bigger set of colleagues to understand and find out what they were doing and engage with,” Hennessy said.(14)
Though his tenure as dean lasted only three years, Hennessy contributed a five-year plan for the school that paved the way for important activities in bioengineering and biomedical engineering. His talents as a leader resulted in his own rapid advance: In 1999, he was appointed provost of Stanford and the next year became the tenth president of Stanford University.
James Plummer, professor of electrical engineering and alumnus of the School of Engineering, was appointed dean of the school following Hennessy. Plummer, who remained in office until 2014, became the longest-serving dean in the history of the School of Engineering. During his tenure, the school would build a Science and Engineering Quad, expanding into the state-of-the-art research and education setting it is today; dramatically increase the number of students majoring in engineering; and help to create interdisciplinary programs such as Bio-X, the Bioengineering Department (jointly operated with the School of Medicine), and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).
“I am honored to be asked to do this job,” Plummer said. “I hope to build on our strengths and move forward with the help of the faculty, administration and students. . . . I couldn’t pass up such a tremendous opportunity to build for the future and to make a difference.”(15)
Near West Campus complete
In 1999, the Near West Campus project opened. Five structures had been torn down, four new ones had gone up, and two others were renovated.
The architects had made a deliberate return to the original campus plan drawn up in 1888 by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, architect Charles Coolidge, and Leland Stanford himself. That plan preserved the natural setting while still allowing for expansion and alignment with the main quad on an east-west axis. The ability to see adjoining quads from the main quad, or vice versa, was more than a nice view—the alignment provided easier access between locations that enabled the meeting of minds.(16)
With the new additions of the Gates Computer Science Building, the David Packard Electrical Engineering Building, the William R. Hewlett Teaching Center, and the renovated McCullough Annex, the Stanford Engineering community was primed for a new century.
“A lot of the really interesting research is interdisciplinary,” said Dean James Plummer. “Having meeting places is important. . . . It’s a magical opportunity for things to happen.”(17)
Exterior view of the David Packard Electrical Engineering Building, 2022. The Packard building was one of four new buildings constructed as part of the first phase of the Near West Campus project. The building became a home for the Electrical Engineering Department. A major renovation of the basement level was undertaken in 2023 to create the new Stanford Robotics Lab, which opened in 2024, along with several new makerspaces. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
Evolving departments
At the diploma ceremony for the Department of Civil Engineering in June 1997, Jeffrey Koseff, professor and chair, addressed fellow faculty, staff, and students, with important news. As of September 1, he said, the department would be known as the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, embracing a field that had grown since the 1970s, and which “is an integral part of what we do, and . . . something of which we are very proud.”(18)
Also in 1997, the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) instigated its own changes. M.-Elisabeth Paté-Cornell (MS ’72 operations research, PhD ’78 engineering-economic systems) was appointed chair—making her the first woman to chair a department in the School of Engineering. Two years later, Paté-Cornell, whose research focused on engineering risk analysis in complex systems, became the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the School of Engineering.(19)
In 2002 the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems, and the Department of Operations Research were merged into a single entity known as the Department of Management Science and Engineering. Students were required to take classes in math, science, and engineering fundamentals, along with Technology in Society and core classes such as Quality Control and Industrial Accounting. Chair Paté-Cornell noted the new department would “create a critical mass in the field of management science and Engineering.”(20)
In the summer of 2002, the School of Engineering continued a trend of championing interdisciplinary work, working with the School of Medicine to add a new department to reflect a growing cross section of engineering with biology and medicine. The result was the Department of Bioengineering, then the only department in the university to be shared by two schools. “We’re not really joining engineering and biology,” noted Dean Plummer. “We’re building something new which sits at the intersection of engineering and the life sciences. We believe that interdisciplinary teaching and research at this intersection represent one of the great opportunities for this century. . . . Engineers have worked on problems deriving from medical needs for many years.”(21)
That problem-solving spirit also led the School of Engineering, in 2004, to evolve the Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics (SCCM) program, started in 1988 by computer science professors Gene Golub and Joseph Oliger, into the new Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME). ICME would apply advanced mathematics and computing techniques to solve a broad array of engineering problems—everything from simulating airflow across an airplane fuselage to detailing complex financial transactions. It grew to include dozens of affiliated faculty from across the university and continues to reach thousands of graduate and undergraduate students each year.(22)
An Internet Revolution: Brin, Page, and the Birth of Google
The original server running the Google algorithm developed by engineering graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made up of ten 4-gigabyte disk drives, encased in toy building blocks, translucent plastic, and packing tape, 1996. This combined 40 GB of storage was considerably larger than what was required of most student projects at the time. It is now on display in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
It’s not every day that a world-changing, billion-dollar company gets started at a recruiting visit for admitted students. But that’s what happened when Larry Page met Sergey Brin in the spring of 1995. Brin, then in his second year of a computer science PhD, had sailed through his first year. In his free time, he stayed busy with sports, practical jokes, rollerblading through the Gates Building hallways, and renumbering the building’s offices to convey the distance between rooms.(23)“Obsessed with efficiency,” Brin needed a worthy outlet for his intellectual energy.(24) He finally found it in one of the newly admitted engineering students he had signed up to guide around San Francisco, the young Larry Page
Page arrived on campus in the fall brimming with ideas. He shared a dozen with his advisor, Terry Winograd, who picked out one about making a mathematical graph of all the links on the Internet and said, “Well, that one seems like a really good idea.”(25) The son of two computer scientists, Page knew as a child that he wanted to change the world by starting a useful company. He was “preoccupied with finding more efficient ways to do things.”(26)Though different in temperament, Page and Brin were on common ground when it came to their ambition and audacious intellect. Page teamed up with Brin on his project, which they soon named BackRub.
Stanford Engineering proved fertile ground for their work. Early funding came from the Stanford Digital Libraries Project, a research effort begun in 1994 to develop technologies for a single, integrated, and “universal” library to provide access to just about anything that could be found online.(27) Stanford also had hardware and bandwidth—lots of the former, and sometimes not enough of the latter. The computing infrastructure for their project was assembled—in Page’s dorm room—from both old and new hardware liberated from around campus; their new search engine was known to occasionally bring the entire university network to its knees. Yet, the project found the support it needed. “We’re lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford,” Page remembered. “They didn’t hassle us too much about the resources we were using.”(28)
By the time Brin and Page presented their BackRub paper in January 1998, they had renamed the project Google. Their audience of graduate students and faculty advisors—including Winograd, Héctor García-Molina, David Cheriton, Jeffrey Ullman, and Rajeev Motwani— understood the Internet revolution that was afoot. Silicon Valley investors, on the other hand, were skeptical at best. But, by summer’s end, Brin and Page had a check for $100,000, and Google, Inc., was formally incorporated on September 7, 1998. It was time to move the whole operation out of the dorm and into the world.
—Charles Petersen
Harold Hohbach Historian at the Silicon Valley Archives, Stanford University
From left: Terry Winograd, Héctor García-Molina, David Cheriton, Larry Page, Rajeev Motwani, and Sergey Brin at a gathering on campus to celebrate Google, 2005. | School of Engineering.
Scientific gravity
With the launch of Gravity Probe B in April 2004, a team of Stanford faculty in aeronautics and astronautics, physics, and other departments, joined by collaborators in government, academia, and industry, realized a forty-year dream of testing key predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Over the years, more than fifty faculty and staff from six departments and dozens of students participated in the project, which had kicked off in 1962 with funding from NASA.
The Gravity Probe B satellite included four “near-perfect” ping-pong-ball-sized gyroscopes that would measure with “unprecedented accuracy” two extraordinary effects that Einstein had predicted almost a century before: the “geodetic effect,” which holds that a mass in space warps the fabric of space like a bowling ball on a bed sheet, and “frame-dragging,” in which the rotating Earth similarly alters space as it moves, had never been measured before.(29)
“Einstein knew that his theory was a little wrong,” said aeronautics and astronautics Professor Bradford Parkinson, the Gravity Probe B program manager in the early 1990s. “It didn’t explain what was going on at very small scales.”(30) In 2011, the peer-reviewed mission report provided a significant experimental confirmation of Einstein’s theory.
Dave Murray (right), a cryogenic engineer from Lockheed Martin, and Mike Taber, Stanford’s cryogenic test director, inspecting the flight dewar for the Gravity Probe B spacecraft when it was under construction, 1996. The dewar acted like a giant thermos bottle to keep the spacecraft’s instruments cool. Gravity Probe B was a long-standing Stanford experiment to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity. A report of the experiment published in 2007 declared success: “The 17.3-month flight mission succeeded in collecting all the data needed to carry out this unprecedented, direct experimental test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity—his theory of gravity.” | Gravity Probe B.
Francis Everitt and Bradford Parkinson at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 2003. Everitt became principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B experiment in 1981; Parkinson was co–principal investigator and project manager. | Gravity Probe B.
Gravity Probe B solar array installation team at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 2004. GP-B was designed to measure two key predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity by monitoring the orientations of ultra-sensitive gyroscopes relative to a distant guide star. After decades of work by Stanford engineers and their partners, the experiment launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on April 20, 2004. | Gravity Probe B.
With characteristic emphasis on pioneering new directions in engineering while extending a welcoming hand to key interdisciplinary collaborations, the Stanford School of Engineering’s eighth decade concluded with a slate of top-ranked educational programs, a docket of high-profile research, and the future firmly in its sights.
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100 Years of Stanford Engineering
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