The proposal, a copy of which was obtained Wednesday, impressed prominent Houston leaders and University of Texas alumni, who are now wondering if the project would still be feasible on the 300-plus acre site near the Texas Medical Center despite the fact that UT has said it no longer plans to pursue it.
"I couldn't stop reading (the proposal) - I think it's a brilliant piece of work," said Charles Miller, a former UT regent and a former Greater Houston Partnership leader.
UT bought the land for $215 million without disclosing its vision for the project, which didn't sit well with state and local officials, including those at the University of Houston. Amid mounting opposition, Chancellor William McRaven called off plans to develop the site earlier this month and said the land would be sold.
Miller said the secrecy surrounding the proposal "was not good, (but) that's a really poor reason to say you don't pursue a great idea."
Last winter, McRaven formed an advisory group comprised of local academic, civic and business leaders to determine how best to use the property.
In its pitch, the group said UT could improve the energy and health industries through intensive data science programs and collaborations with industry and national laboratories. Authors imagined more efficient and sustainable energy distribution and smarter health care delivery. Education would have been the third proposed field of study.
UT, the authors said, would be uniquely positioned to obtain and analyze massive amounts of data securely. There are already nearly 50,000 UT students, faculty, staff and medical residents in Houston, according to the report.
"Winners and losers in the years ahead will be determined by who has the greatest ability to collect, analyze and activate that data," the report said. "If Houston wants to remain a global leader in energy and healthcare, it needs to be a leader in Data Science - and it needs its primary Data Science resource to be located in the city."
Derailed by bad timing
McRaven called off the project before regents could vote on the task force's proposal.
Houston developer David Wolff, chairman and president of Wolff Companies and former Metro chairman, said that a more significant presence from the UT system in Houston would diversify Houston's economy.
He said he's talked to lawmakers, task force members, UT alumni and other Houston leaders about potentially reviving the project. Several people agree, he said, but he recognizes that there is opposition to any Houston expansion because of UT's initial botched rollout.
"A number of people say it wasn't handled properly, but no one says we don't need UT here," he said.
Miller, the former UT regent and businessman, said the project would "have to be revived by people outside the UT System."
"They've been battered so much by the politicians and local people," he said.
Paul Hobby, the founding partner of Genesis Park, and Carin Barth, the president and co-founder of LB Capital, co-chaired the task force.
"This is an important idea," Hobby said in an email. "We knew that the local politics were toxic and worked very hard to create a compelling vision that would change the conversation. Unfortunately the way the timing worked we will never know if it would have done that."
Barth did not respond to questions about the proposal.
'Much bigger demand'
There are currently at least 178 U.S. graduate business programs covering data analytics and information management, a spokeswoman for the Graduate Management Admission Council said. Twenty-three of those are in Texas.
Rice University has heavily invested in data science, starting a $43 million institute and hiring tenure-track faculty members to work with city data on urban flooding, air quality and education policy, said provost Marie Lynn Miranda. Rice recently announced a data partnership with IBM.
"(The UT proposal's) premise is something I agree with," she said. "We would have been enthusiastic about the opportunity to partner with other data scientists."
The University of Houston-Downtown offers a master's in data analytics, and UH will launch a workforce program in the field next fall.
MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2013 contracted with IBM to attempt to use the company's supercomputer Watson to analyze data from 1 million cancer patients, disease information and treatment options. That program was later abandoned, and a recent audit found significant financial irregularities with the project.
The scope of the task force's proposal is what sets it apart from existing programs, its supporters say.
There are "really just a handful" of centers that combine work from private companies, national laboratories and universities, said Bill Gropp, the acting director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"There's a much bigger demand ... than there is supply," he said Wednesday. "It's something we find quite concerning."
Gropp's center has collaborated with Exxon Mobil Corp. on a modeling project that can predict how much oil will be withdrawn from a reservoir in a matter of minutes or hours. Without the center's processing speed, a spokeswoman said Wednesday, that process could take days. UT's task force and McRaven toured an Exxon Mobil site in May 2016 to see the campus's design.
Lack of transparency
Energy and oil companies globally have turned to data analytics as a cost-savings technique, said Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst with Raymond James.
Data analysis tools are especially important when companies begin drilling in new areas, he said.
"A few million spent in data analysis can save $100 million on a bad well," he said.
Texas Southern University public policy professor Jay Kumar Aiyer saw the proposal on Wednesday and said it could have garnered support in Houston if it were announced before UT called off the project.
"(UH) viewed it as an institution that would significantly damage them in terms of undercutting them on students," said Aiyer, a chief of staff for former mayor Lee Brown. "This does not look like that at all."
A UH spokesman had no comment on the proposal.
Gov. Greg Abbott's press secretary, John Wittman, said they had not seen the UT study and had no comment on it.
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