The Computer Science Department at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

is an academic department in the College of Engineering and Applied Science focusing on the teaching and research of

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 ...

. The department was founded in 1970 and was later inducted into the College of Engineering and Applied Science in 1980. The department offers both undergraduate and graduate degree programs as well as a minor in Computer Science.

Academic programs

Undergraduate

The department offers a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in computer science as well as a minor. The four year undergraduate degree program typically culminates in a year-long senior projects course in which industry groups submit projects for groups of students to work on. The department also offers a working and studying area known as the Computer Science Educational Labs (CSEL). It is a common gathering place for students enrolled in at least one computer science course at the university, providing computing resources in the form of

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

workstations. A student-led group called the Computer Science Undergraduate Advisory Committee (CSUAC) works with students and faculty to improve the undergraduate program and provides resources such as career fairs and other community events.

Graduate

The graduate program offers either a MS or ME or a Ph.D. The program places a high priority on research and the placement of its students in future careers. The department is supported by $4 million annually in the form of research grants primarily from federal agencies such as the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

. Graduate students research in many areas, including human-computer interaction,

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

, numerical and parallel computation,

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

systems A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and expresse ...

, and

theoretical computer science computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the ...

Research

Currently, the department has 34 research faculty and 18 administrative staff. Some of the more prevalent realms of research include computer architecture, mobile computing, computer security,

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the ...

, robotics, algorithm design, artificial intelligence, web engineering, programming languages, computer-supported cooperative work, machine learning, lifelong learning and design, speech and language processing, and scientific computing.

Achievements and awards

The department has received four successive five-year awards from the NSF and

Comparative Effectiveness Research Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the direct comparison of existing health care interventions to determine which work best for which patients and which pose the greatest benefits and harms. The core question of comparative effectiveness ...

to support both research and infrastructure. The department also received the largest ever gift to a public university in the form of $250 million to fund research to improve the lives of people diagnosed with cognitive disabilities. The department is a member of the ARPA National Consortium in High Performance Computing. Apple co-founder

Steve Wozniak Stephen Gary Wozniak (; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American electronics engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, inventor, and entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur. In 1976, with business partner Steve ...

donated money to create the "Woz Lab" within the Computer Science Education Lab. Wozniak studied at the university in the late 1960s.

Notable faculty and alumni

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...

Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Andrzej Ehrenfeucht (, born 8 August 1932) is a Polish-American mathematician and computer scientist. Life Andrzej Ehrenfeucht formulated the Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game, using the back-and-forth method given in Roland Fraïssé's PhD thesis ...

David Haussler David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that d ...

Eugene Myers Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. Education Myers receiv ...

, honorary Doctor of Engineering

References

University of Colorado Department of Computer Science

External links

University of Colorado Boulder Department of Computer Science

College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado Boulder

University of Colorado Boulder
{{University of Colorado Boulder

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the ...

Computer Science Department A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These progra ...