The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, one of the top Computer Science programs in the world, has just officially opened their new $80 million Siebel Center.

The department head describes the building as a single computing entity, meant to be programmed and to interact with those in the building via RFID tags in their ID cards. This is probably one of the biggest and most expensive projects in ubiquitous computing ever launched, touching on all the important issues in this field, from privacy to the ultimate question about the usefulness of such a system.