In 2001, Simon Penny took up a 50/50 joint position in the School of Engineering and the School of the Arts at UCI. He proceeded to establish an interdisciplinary graduate program called Arts Computation Engineering (ACE). He drafted the program and had it approved by the university, wrote the curriculum and 27 course action forms, designed and oversaw the establishment of a 5000sq ft purpose design facility that included computer labs, media production facilities, electronics lab, fabrication shop and welding bay, as well as teaching spaces and studios and the campus’s only heterogenous network, built by ACE technician Tom Jennings. He hired 3 official FTE and 2.5 staff. The program had a $120,000 PA line item budget and affiliated faculty from several schools. It admitted its first intake of 10 grad students in fall 2003., and admitted ~10 each year from then on. When the letter was on the provosts desk to permit ACE to move ahead with PhD program development, the 2008 budget crisis hit and the program was shut down by its then administrative home (School of information and Computer Science) - and its line item budget was unceremoniously absorbed by that school. ACE graduated its last cohort in 2012.