The Department of Computer Sciences

The Department of Computer Sciences officially opened its doors on September 1, 1966. It was strictly a graduate program consisting of 44 students and 13 faculty members with an administrative staff of one. As the plural term implies, the new department was designed to bring together computer scientists previously identified with several different academic fields. When the popularity of the computer-related studies began to soar in the mid-1970s, the need for a coordinated undergraduate computer science program was evident. The undergraduate program became a reality in September 1974 with 350 undergraduate computer science majors.

Today, the Department's graduate enrollment of 220 and undergraduate enrollment of 1,100 have access to many other computing-related programs at UT and in the Austin community. Among these are excellent programs at the University in computer engineering, cognitive science, computational and applied mathematics, computational mechanics, and management information systems. Associated with the university are a number of organizations such as the Applied Research Laboratories and the High Performance Computing Facility of The UT-Austin Computation Center which offer opportunities for research and employment to both students and faculty.

The graduate program is recognized as one of the top 10 computer science programs in the country. This recognition is both from the standard academic survey and from a 1993 U.S. News and World Report survey of top academic institutions. Graduates from the department's programs are recruited by leading industrial, government, and research institutions in the country.

Students have many opportunities to hear and interact with scientists and engineers from outside the university. There is a steady stream of seminars given by visiting computing scientists from all over the world. In addition, the department's Distinguished Lecture Series and Introspection Lecture Series, and Computer Science Industrial Forum feature invited lectures by computer scientists of the first rank.

The 40 faculty members (many of whom hold chairs, professorships, and teaching fellowships) include twelve Fellows of organizations such as AAAI, British Computer Society, IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; two NSF Young Investigator Award winners, and one Turing Award winner. Their educational backgrounds include some of the nation's most prestigious universities and colleges. A number of department faculty including Drs. Nell Dale, John Werth, Laurie Werth, and Vijaya Ramachandran hold prominent leadership roles in computer science education at the national and international level. These positions are a reflection of the department's continuing influential role in computer science education.

gripe@cs.utexas.edu