Work is well underway on the Milwaukee School of Engineering‘s plan to become the statewide leader in artificial intelligence education. The bricks-and-mortar centerpiece of that effort is the new, $34 million Dwight and Dian Diercks Computational Science Hall located at 1025 N. Milwaukee St.

The new facility and new bachelors of computer science degree program are being funded by a gift from Dwight Diercks, a 1990 graduate of the school, and his wife Dian. The gift, the largest in the school’s 115-year-history, was made possible by Diercks’ role as NVIDIA’s vice president of software engineering at the approximately 11,000 employee tech company. He’s been with the California-based company since the early 1990’s when he joined as the 22nd employee.

NVIDIA’s technology, both hardware and software, is used in everything from computer gaming and graphics processing to self-driving vehicle and cryptocurrency computation. The new facility will include a computing cluster laden with graphics processing units that will enable large-scale applications and computations to be executed by MSOE students, staff and industry partners. A handful of MSOE faculty members were recently at NVIDIA’s annual conference to further their education in the company’s “deep learning” framework and become certified instructors.

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