Expanding CS Theory Research

Research, News

The CMU Computer Science Department has started a bit of a growth spurt, and one of the areas that is expanding is theoretical computer science. Next week, Venkat Guruswami will be joining us for a one-year visiting appointment. (Personally, I’m hoping he’ll end up staying here permanently!) The combination of Venkat with our recent hiring of Ryan O’Donnell significantly beefs up our research capabilities in complexity theory, algorithms, and related areas. Another important new hire is Andre Platzer, who does superb work in formal methods and particularly in hybrid systems verification; he will be joining us in October.

Of course, this is on top of what is already a pretty strong presence in several theory areas. By my rough count, we will have 12 faculty members who work in algorithms and complexity theory, and 11 who work in applied logic, type theory, and formal verification. Given the demands of the major research problems in such diverse areas as parallel and distributed computing, data-intensive machine learning, software reliability, privacy and security, high-performance networking, computational biology, computational astrophysics, and others, I have no doubt that they will all be kept extremely busy.

Overall, it seems pretty clear that, over the next decade, the best CS departments will be required to have the best theory research. We’ll be working hard to recruit the people we need to do just that.

Peter Lee @ August 26, 2008