Soda Hall Space Policy

Lecture Space Policies

General Policy on Lecture Rooms

Our aim is to accommodate in Soda Hall all CS graduate courses, most upper-division CS courses, and some of the lower-division CS courses, to the degree that they fit into our facilities. In particular, the HP Auditorium (306) is not viewed primarily as a conference facility, but as a “high-tech” classroom. Classes with special A/V needs will have priority in the rooms equipped with such facilities.

However, we want to keep some of our seminar and lecture rooms free for our main seminars as well as for surprise guest seminars and for recruiting-type seminars, which often are scheduled around lunch time.

Here is a list of the available facilities in Soda Hall and their intended usage plans:

Auditorium 306:

Classes between 8am and 4pm only; reserved for our five main seminars after 4pm. Ideally we would like to keep a few lunch slots open, say MWF from 12 noon to 1 pm, for large ad hoc events.

Regular classes might be relocated from the auditorium to another room (e.g. to Sibley) on special occasions when an important CS Division event needs the facilities of 306 and cannot otherwise be accommodated.

Classroom 310:

OK to schedule classes all day.

Seminar Room 320:

OK to schedule classes all day.

Conference Room 326:

NO regularly scheduled events.
The room is primarily at the disposition of the CS chair
for short-notice meetings and seminars.

Seminar Room 373:

For seminars and research groups.
NO regular classes.

Conference Room 380:

For seminars, work-groups, and small graduate courses in need of the special audio-visual and communications equipment in this room.

Hi-tech Seminar 405:

• Classes: 8 am – 11 am, and 1 pm – 4 pm, MWF;
• classes: 8 am – 11 am, and 12:30 – 3:30 pm, Tu Th.
• Reserved for ad hoc seminars during the lunch period.
• Reserved for another five key seminars after 4 pm.

NO undergraduate events after 6pm !

Conference Room 606:

For seminars and research groups.
NO regular classes.

Social Spaces

General Rules for Meeting Rooms, Social Spaces

The CS Lounge (and other facilities controlled by card key or a regular key) are for the use of the people who have such a key. Bringing in large numbers of people who do not have this access requires the permission of the CS chair.

Divisional (Wozniak) Lounge

The Wozniak Lounge (430-438) is a place for socializing and group discussion among graduate students, staff, faculty, and visitors who have a blue card with proper access authorization. It is not meant to be a quiet study place; if you are looking for a quiet place, please go to the Reading Room 681.

The  Wozniak Lounge is not a general meeting room, and it is only rarely made available to non-CS units. The Lounge can only be used for non-academic, non-university activities with the explicit permission of the CS Chair. Any guest group should understand that the CS Division has no facilities staff that can help with furniture rearrangement or with other kinds of preparations in this room; guest groups are expected to make their own arrangements for such services as well as for final cleanup and for restoring the Lounge to its usual furniture arrangement.

The terrace doors of the Lounge are NOT an entrance to the building. Nobody should request entry from the terrace and nobody should grant entry through these doors after hours.

East-West Lounges

We have several open and airy lounges with lots of white-board space at the E/W ends of the corridors. We want to have these spaces used as much as possible. These are primarily RESEARCH spaces and should not be used for instructional functions such as the discussion sessions associated with undergraduate courses. Since these lounges were placed in Soda Hall _instead_ of some additional conference and seminar rooms, this is their primary function, and as a result there is a priority ranking of possible uses for these spaces:

Highest priority is for scheduled group meetings headed by a faculty or staff member.

Other uses in order of decreasing priority:

• Spontaneous group meetings by faculty staff or graduate students with home offices on floors 4 through 7 of Soda Hall.
• Group meetings for other legitimate users of Soda Hall.
• Study areas for Computer Science students.

Groups with a usage of higher priority should politely inform users with lower priority of their wish to use a particular lounge, preferably with a few minutes warning so that the current occupants can collect their belongings and move to another place.
Word has gotten around to many students outside EECS that these lounges are nice places for studying and group meetings.
Legitimate users from the CS Division should not feel too timid or too embarrassed to ask such outside users to free up a lounge when they want to use that lounge themselves.

Please clean up after your meetings and put furniture back to where it belongs.

Please do not operate the fire doors for the lounges. These are Fire Emergency doors only and not designed for manual use.

6th Floor Loggia

Please respect the privacy of the occupants of the offices opening onto the Loggia; when you step through room 681 onto the Loggia, please stay away from the office windows.

Other Spaces

Visitor Spaces

We agreed that: the number of VIFs, VisFacs, PostDocs, TechResStaff should be formally controlled… by a “space czar” or a very small committee (but not by the graduate admissions committee). It is impractical to have only a few reviews of all pending applicants per year, because approval schedules are often needed on short notice. We may give some rough allocation to individual groups so they can manage their own visitor space as long as they remain below that limit. If they want to exceed that limit, they may have to negotiate with other groups or with the space czar for additional space (and the process may take considerably longer).

No guidelines were established on an initial allocation quota nor on the desirable relative proportion of the different types of visitors.

General Shared Storage Spaces

There are very few such spaces. In general, everybody stores whatever they want to keep in their own (office) space. (Reason: Once something goes to a central shared storage space, it rarely is reclaimed, since the problem and the pressure to find a solution have become invisible.)

The Roof

The university has decreed that only maintenance workers and people fleeing from a fire should be allowed to go to the roof. The white water-proof membrane is not designed for walking on; it will crack — and then the roof will leak.

Security

General Rules

Please try to get to know the people on your floor. If, after hours, you find people on your floor whom you don’t know, ask them politely who they are and where they might be going. Let’s show everybody that we care and watch out for our environment.

Main Entrances

The only legal entries into Soda Hall after regular work-hours are from Leroy Avenue and from the Etcheverry Plaza with proper card access.

Don’t grant access to people after hours whom you do not know or who cannot make a convincing argument that they have some legitimate business in Soda Hall.

(Intercom ?)

We now have a 125 code intercom at the 4th floor entrance and a 24 code unit at the 3rd floor entrance. After-hour visitors can use these intercoms to call the person in the building expecting their visits. To dial: Press red button, then enter the last 4 digits of a resident’s office telephone number. (No directories are displayed at either entrance to avoid harassment.)

Keys and Card Keys

The original plan behind the system of card keys and physical keys, has been somewhat distorted during implementation; — too many authorities made small uncoordinated adjustments. Still, the general idea is that (except for the fire department) no individual gets any physical key for any door with a card key. The idea is to provide controlled access through such doors and to obtain a complete record of who accessed those doors during the hours when they are locked. The physical floor-submasters should work on all doors on that floor except for the doors with computer control.

Miscellaneous

Glass Walls

Floors 4-7 of Soda Hall are light and sunny thanks to the glass walls and windows.

If you feel you must cover some of the glass, please try to emulate the pattern etched into the glass walls on floors 6 and 7: solid coverage no higher than 4 feet above the floor, translucent or loose, partial coverage up to 6 feet, NO coverage above 6 feet.

Hang any paper on the INSIDE of the rooms — even if you want to display a nice poster for the benefit of the people in the corridor. (Perhaps put up two posters back to back).

Bulletin Boards and Posting

New bulletin boards in the corridors should only be hung by the Soda Hall Facilities Unit (393 Soda)  to maintain some uniformity in style.

Besides than the bulletin boards in the main E/W hallways, most bulletin boards are clearly associated with some office or with some lab. I encourage the occupants of these rooms to remove junk posted by strangers on these bulletin boards. We want to keep our bulletin boards reasonably un-cluttered, optically as well as physically, in order to sway the fire marshal to tolerate the extra number of bulletin boards we have that go beyond the official interpretation of the fire code.

Please NO postings outside bulletin boards!  Please don’t post things on bare walls. (It’s OK to post temporary sign-up sheets on your office doors with tape that can easily be removed and does not damage the paint.)

(Last updated: 24-Aug-2022)