Are There 20 Top-10 CS Departments?
I’m on board a Delta flight bound for Pittsburgh right now. My curiosity got the best of me and so I plunked down some money (too much, really) to try out the airline’s new-ish inflight wifi service. My first in-flight blog entry! ;-)
It’s been a busy few months, particularly with travels. I’m flying back right now from Austin, where I was part of a small committee taking a look at the University of Texas CS Department. The department has superb faculty and students and many great accomplishments to point to in both research and education. Just as impressive was the department’s warm, collegial atmosphere. It’s pretty apparent that J Moore has been a great chair.
Last week I was in Philadelphia, visiting the UPenn CIS Department to give a distinguished lecture for this year’s Saul Gorn Memorial Lecture. My lecture was on programming languages for coordinating very large numbers of distributed computing nodes (which I also gave at KAIST earlier this year), based largely on the work by my students, Michael Ashley-Rollman and Michael De Rosa (co-advised by Seth Goldstein). I was very happy to have the chance to give this lecture, although with all the very good researchers in both programming languages and multi-robot planning and systems at UPenn, I was a bit nervous about it all. Fortunately the lecture seemed to go just fine and I ended up learning a lot from the day’s interactions.
A couple of observations from the two visits. First, the field of computer science is expanding incredibly rapidly, with new connections to the natural and social sciences, arts, energy, healthcare, business, and many, many other areas. Figuring out how to cope with all of this with only limited growth in research funding is a major question for department heads and senior faculty members at all good places doing computing research today. It seems clear to me that we need somehow to expand dramatically the number of world-class researchers in the field. Second, there are a lot of very good CS departments nowadays. This means that for departments that want to maintain or move into top 10 ranking, the field is getting very, very crowded.
In a sense, I suspect there are now about 20 top-10 CS departments, and that’s a good thing for the field.
Peter Lee @ April 22, 2009
How is having 20 top 10 CS departments a good thing for CMU? If a new department hires young bright faculty whereas old universities (like the top 4) have aging tenured profs, then how will Carnegie Mellon remain number 1.
Your first and second observations are twinned, I think. As CS moves into more areas, there are more specialties, meaning there are more opportunities for departments to boast (truthfully) of having “top researchers in x”.
I think what it comes down to is size. Having a larger faculty will almost certainly entail having a better faculty, because you have coverage in more areas. Example: Harvard has a great CS/Econ presence, but they don’t have anyone doing machine learning!
There is a lot of computer science research to do. I think the world will be better off if there are more really good research departments in the field. We’re all for growing the pie, not keeping it all to ourselves. I think we’ll have more natural advantages in a more diverse community. And anyway, for CMU (or any other good place), it’s far, far better to be #1 in a big field than in a smaller one…
So, why rank departments at all. As ABE mentions Harvard is number one in econ/cs but overall its not a tier one cs department, so what is the point of giving overall rankings. For undergraduate studies yes, but why rank grad schools. How is a person doing econ/cs at CMU better than one doing econ/cs at Harvard???
Yes, rankings are kind of a weird thing. Having said that, there is a lot of competition for grad students among different groupings of PhD programs. We work really hard at this, as do all the other good programs. In a way, how successful any given program is in attracting applications from and then recruiting the students they really want determines a kind of pecking order. And, in turn, the environment of really, really creative, smart, and talented researchers helps everyone do better work. For sure we’ll all be better off if more departments are able to get the talented students they really want.
Va la I Really like this useful article. Wishing to get more reserch departmants year after year. Good luck.