NYU Polytechnic Institute expands

The Polytechnic Institute of New York University took a big step in growing its downtown Brooklyn campus by expanding into another building at Metrotech Center.

The new, 120,000-square-foot space on the ninth and 10th floors will accommodate new classes, research labs and offices for the school's fastest-growing departments, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science.

University staff, joined by city government officials, celebrated the expansion with a champagne reception Friday. But the university had already begun moving equipment into the new space, setting up a large server room as well as a data lab, with much more equipment to come.

Professors were enthusiastic about the expansion, saying it will let them bring more inventions to the world, better and faster.

"There's nothing now that a scientist touches physically as much as he touches through an instrument. These are instruments that we invent and build," said Jerry Hultin, the president of Polytech. "You've got cybersecurity, you've got media, you've got big data, all things that need to be expanded to make a better world. That's what we'll build on these two floors."

Ten floors above the congratulatory toasts, several PhD students stood in front of a wall-sized screen made out of multiple individual monitors, showing a Google map of New York rendered in 100 million pixels. This lab will allow researchers from all departments to look at highly dense data of the human body, the patterns of human movement through cities and other visualizations that can be applied across most branches of science.

Hultin said the campus will continue to grow. Eventually, he said, the school will move its administration to a new space at 15 Metrotech Plaza, then demolish the current administration building and erect a science and engineering tower in its place.

While it will take five to 10 years to raise money for this project, it would double the volume of research coming from Polytech's campus.

"Think of it as innovation square in Brooklyn," Hultin said.