HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The School of Computer Science (SOCS) is an
academic department An academic department is a division of a university or school faculty devoted to a particular academic discipline. This article covers United States usage at the university level. In the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries, univers ...
in the
Faculty of Science Faculty may refer to: * Faculty (academic staff), the academic staff of a university (North American usage) * Faculty (division), a division within a university (usage outside of the United States) * Faculty (instrument), an instrument or warrant ...
at
McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...
in
Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple-pea ...
, Canada. The school is the second most funded
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
department in
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
.General Information
/ref> It currently has 34 faculty members, 60
Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
students and 100
Master's A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.
students.


History

The creation of a Computer Science organization was led by Chair of Electrical Engineering (and later Dean of Engineering) George Lee (John) d'Ombrain. He is credited with bringing the first computer to McGill University in 1958.History of the Faculty of Engineering
/ref> The first graduate student in computing at McGill University was Gerald Ratzer, who arrived from
Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
in September 1964. There he pursued an M.Sc. in the Faculty of Graduate Sciences, under the supervision of David Thorpe, Director of the McGill Computing Centre. The School of Computer Science was formally created in 1969. Computer Science was originally housed in
Burnside Hall Burnside Hall (french: Pavillon Burnside) is a McGill University building located at 805 Sherbrooke Street West, on the university's downtown campus in Montreal, Quebec. It is named after Burnside Place, the Montreal estate of James McGill, the ...
, which was built in 1970.Burnside Hall Information
/ref>
/ref> It is notable for containing the Computing Centre, which contributed funds to Computer Science faculty such as Timothy Howard Merrett. The School moved into the McConnell Building in 1988. The use of the term "School" was to reinforce the idea of independence from the Faculty of Engineering. Over the years, the School of Computer Science continued to face difficulties over sharing resources such as academic slots, teaching assistants, and space with their Engineering peers. This was partly due to cross-appointments of faculty from Electrical Engineering, leaving Computer Science understaffed. There were also concerns amongst engineers that Computer Science was not a professional discipline, and that students would choose Computer Science over Engineering, lowering the amount of funding available. This led to engineers pressuring the School not to have major and master's degrees for a long time. The minor in Computer Science was created in 1978 with the undergraduate program following in 1979; however, the major program was not created until 1990. Eventually, a heated debate between Dean Dealy of the Faculty of Engineering and Dean Shaver of the Faculty of Science in 1995 led to the School moving to Science in 1997.


Academics


Research

In 1984, McGill University owned the two
USENET Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
nodes in Quebec: one for Computer Science, and the other for Computer vision.1984 Map of Usenet in Canada
/ref> Around 1992, McGill was also the main network hub for all of Quebec's academic networksData Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class
/ref> In 1985, the McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines (McRCIM) was formed by four researchers – Martin Levine, Steve Zucker, Pierre Bélanger, and George Zames. Today, it is known as the Centre for Intelligent Machines, and seeks to advance the state of knowledge in such domains as robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, computer vision, systems and control theory, and speech recognition.History of CIM
/ref> The first Internet Search Engine,
Archie search engine Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, then a postgraduate student a ...
, was written in 1989 by three McGill computer science students Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch. In September of the 1993 academic year, a new Major Program for a B.A. in Computer Science was established.School of Computer Science Annual Reports This led to a ratio of weighted FTEs per professor (23.18) that was amongst the highest at McGill University. The
MUSIC/SP ''MUSIC/SP (Multi-User System for Interactive Computing/System Product''; originally "McGill University System for Interactive Computing") was developed at McGill University in the 1970s from an early IBM time-sharing system called RAX ( Remo ...
mainframe operating system was developed and marketed by McGill University. With novel features such as file access control and data compression, it was used worldwide until being discontinued in 2007.MUSIC information
/ref>


Programs offered

The School currently offers the following programs:


Undergraduate

*Major, Honours, Liberal, Minor, Major Concentration and Minor concentrations programs in Computer Science *Major, Liberal and Major Concentration programs in Software Engineering *Major in Computer Science: Computer Games Option *Joint Major and Joint Honours in Mathematics and Computer Science *Joint Major and Joint Honours in Statistics and Computer Science *Joint Major in Physics and Computer Science *Joint Major and Joint Honours in Computer Science and Biology McGill's Computer Science undergraduate society, CSUS, is a team of executive members that work together in representing all undergraduate constituents. They are elected every year and host events, workshops, information sessions and are also available to answer student questions and bring up any concerns that they may have.


Graduate

*Master in Computer Science (Thesis): Computational Science and Engineering *Master in Computer Science (Thesis): Bioinformatics *Master in Computer Science (Non-Thesis) *PhD: advanced research


Enrollment

The following data was taken from the School of Computer Science annual reports (calculated as students in Major and Honours program).


Student Representatives

The Computer Science Undergraduate Society (CSUS) https://mcgill-csus.ca is an elected student group tasked with improving student academics and life in the computer science department at McGill University. This includes discussing course changes with faculty, organizing events, maintaining the free tutoring services, collating student feedback, and promoting a sense of community.


Buildings


McConnell Engineering Building

The School of Computer Science is located in the McConnell Engineering Building, which was donated to McGill University by John W. McConnell in 1959.
/ref> McConnell was a major benefactor of the University since 1911 and one of its Governors from 1928 until 1958.


Trottier Building

The Lorne M. Trottier Building houses Computer Science computer labs, classrooms, and study spaces. This building is named after
Lorne Trottier Lorne M. Trottier, OC (born 15 June 1948) is a Canadian engineer, businessman and philanthropist. He co-founded Matrox, a computer corporation that specializes in computer graphics. Trottier sits as an advisor to Canada's Ecofiscal Commission. ...
, who donated ten million dollars to construct it in 2000/2001. The Trottier Building opened in 2003.


Notable members


Faculty

*
David Avis David Michael Avis (born March 20, 1951) is a Canadians, Canadian and United Kingdom, British computer scientist known for his contributions to geometric computations. Avis is a professor in computational geometry and applied mathematics in the S ...
- Discrete optimization and computational geometry * Claude Crépeau -
Quantum computing Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...
and
cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
*
Luc Devroye Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye specializes in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, r ...
- Probabilistic analysis of algorithms *
Gregory Dudek Gregory L. Dudek is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in robotics, computer vision, and intelligent systems. He is a chaired professor at McGill University where he has led the Mobile Robotics Lab since the 1990s (a role now shared with P ...
- Robotics * Laurie Hendren - Compiler Techniques and Tools *
Prakash Panangaden Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian computer scientist noted for his research in programming language theory, concurrency theory, Markov processes and duality theory. Earlier he worked on quantum field theory in curved space-time and radia ...
- Probabilistic Systems, Quantum Information * Joëlle Pineau -
Machine Learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
* Doina Precup -
Reinforcement Learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...
* Bruce Reed - Graph theory


Former faculty

* Patrick Hayden - Quantum information and quantum computing *
George Marsaglia George Marsaglia (March 12, 1924 – February 15, 2011) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is best known for creating the diehard tests, a suite of software for measuring statistical randomness. Research on random numbers ...
- Expert on
random number generation Random number generation is a process by which, often by means of a random number generator (RNG), a sequence of numbers or symbols that cannot be reasonably predicted better than by random chance is generated. This means that the particular outc ...
*
Godfried Toussaint Godfried Theodore Patrick Toussaint (1944 – July 2019) was a Canadian computer scientist, a professor of computer science, and the head of the Computer Science Program at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. ...
- Computational and discrete geometry *
Monty Newborn Monroe "Monty" Newborn (born May 21, 1938), former chairman of the Computer Chess Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, is a professor emeritus of computer science at McGill University in Montreal (formerly professor of electrical e ...
- Chess AI, automated theorem-proving * Tomasz Imieliński - Databases, Data Mining. Mobile Computing, Search engine technology * Mads Haahr (''Visiting Professor'') - Physically-derived random number generation, Founder of Random.org


Alumni

* Alan Emtage *
Changpeng Zhao Changpeng Zhao (), commonly known as "CZ", is a Chinese-Canadian business executive. Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume as of July 2022. CZ was born in Jiangsu, China and mov ...
(the founder of
Binance Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange which is the largest exchange in the world in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. It was founded in 2017 and is registered in the Cayman Islands. Binance was founded by Changpeng Zhao, a deve ...
)


References


External links


http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/
{{Authority control McGill University Computer science departments in Canada