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Introduction to the CU CS Dept.

Computer Science Department
University of Colorado at Boulder
Academic Year 1995/96

Introduction to the Department


General Information

The Department of Computer Science was founded in 1970, and has been part of the College of Engineering and Applied Science since 1980. The Department offers the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science. It prides itself on achieving excellence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The Department currently has about 250 undergraduate majors, 80 masters students, and 80 Ph.D. students. It has 25 faculty members, whose specialties include artificial intelligence (human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and neural networks), compilers, databases, groupware, networks, numerical computation, operating systems, parallel computation, programming languages, software engineering, and theoretical computer science. It offers undergraduate courses, graduate courses, and research opportunities in all of these areas. The Department is particularly proud that five of its faculty have been awarded National Science Foundation (Presidential) Young Investigator awards, awarded nationally to an elite group of young faculty who show particular promise in teaching and research.

Undergraduate Program

The undergraduate program has several features that distinguish it nationally. One of these is a very successful year-long senior projects course, taken by all majors, in which students work in teams on significant projects mainly submitted by industry. Another is a ground-blazing High Performance Scientific Computing course sequence that has been adopted by many universities nation-wide. The department has excellent computing laboratory facilities for its undergraduate students that are run almost entirely by the students and offer excellent opportunities for training in system administration.

Graduate Program

At the graduate education and research level, the department is one of the leading departments in the nation, as measured by the prominence of its research programs and the placement of its students. It has internationally prominent research groups in human-computer interaction, neural networks, and numerical and parallel computation, and significant prominence in many other areas including databases, networks, software engineering, systems, and theoretical computer science. Currently, its faculty and students are supported by approximately $4 million annually in research grants, primarily from federal agencies. In addition, the department has been the recipient of two consecutive five-year research infrastructure grants from the National Science Foundation, totaling roughly $5 million, and millions of dollars of grants for parallel computers. These grants have produced excellent computing facilities for research and graduate education.

Who's Who in the Department

There are a few essential folks in the Department: Please contact Vicki or Arlene first for information about graduate or undergraduate study in the Department.


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Dept of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0430, webmaster@cs.colorado.edu.