Department of Computer Science

1
Department of Computer Science

• Engineering Council Meeting
• April 15, 2004
• Henning Schulzrinne

2
Overview

• State of the Department
• enrollment, new faculty
• Academic program reform
• Research
• Computing facilities
• Student life
• Visibility
• Alumni outreach
• Improvements in administration
• Challenges

3
RESEARCH
Interacting with Humans (7)
Interacting with the Physical World (9)
Making Sense of Data (9)
Systems (10)
Computer Science Theory (7)
Designing Digital Systems (3)
4
Enrollments

• 183 MS students
• 113 PhD students
• 427 PhD applications for Fall 2004
• Undergraduate classes (approximate)
• (only counting seniors)
• SEAS 120
• CC 30
• General Studies 20
• CC contrentrators 20
• Computer engineering 50
• Has been relatively stable, despite decreases
  outside Columbia

5
Student life

• Attempts at improving feeling of departmental
  cohesion
• Very active ACM and WICS (women in Computer
  Science) organizations
• Lounge as central social hub and bump space
• projector for impromptu meetings and
  presentations
• coffee hour
• movie club
• but distribution across two buildings
• Paula Ryan organizing social events for
  undergraduates and MS students

6
Outreach and visibility

• Newsletter (CS_at_CU) twice a year
• mailed to top-25 CS faculty, chairs, etc.
• Announcements of new faculty hires sent (card)
• Mailing list for events and accomplishments

7
Alumni

• Working on new website for alumni
• job listings
• contact and searching
• Friendster/Orkut-style social networking
• alice_at_alum.cs.
• Outreach for 25th anniversary celebration

8
Administrative improvements

• Common data store and web interface for
  departmental management
• MICE
• Now handling all graduate student and faculty
  applications in-house
• in-house development
• some teething pains, but generally well received

9
Challenges

• High student cost
• Challenges for Computer Science in general
• external perception of field and career prospects
• fewer Asian graduate applicants (visa issues)

10
Statistics PhD Student Cost (2000)

• Princeton 46,870Columbia 45,724Yale
  40,920Penn 40,617Chicago
  39,792MIT 39,726Cornell
  35,930JHU 34,235Stanford
  31,932Brown 27,812Rochester
  27,115Dartmouth 26,590