Computer Science Department example essay topic

The University of Arizona's Computer Science Department is a quality research program. The most recent National Research Council rankings place the department 33rd out of 108 PhD-granting institutions nationwide, despite the fact that we are a comparatively small department. In addition, we are the best Computer Science department of our size among publicly funded Universities, with the highest in number of citations (references) per faculty, and 17th overall in the number of publications per faculty. Another measure of our research productivity includes awards of external research funding in excess of $2.5 million from such prestigious sources as DARPA, INTEL, and NSF, including our fourth 5-year Research Infrastructure awarded in 2000. Our faculty serve on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, serve on program committees, publish books, and serve as fellows and chairs of organizations within the ACM and I. In terms of teaching, our undergraduate and graduate curriculum provides a timely and well-rounded view of the field, with special emphasis on the practical aspects of building useful software. Our strengths lie in the traditional mainstream of areas of computer science: algorithms, programming languages, operating systems, distributed computing, networks, databases and theory of computing.

We also offer courses in some subfields: graphics, artificial intelligence and the software aspects of computer architecture. The department's programs prepare students for positions in the design and development of computer systems and applications, in business and industry, and for scientific positions in industrial or academic computing research. The Computer Science department was established in 1973 as a graduate department offering masters and doctoral degrees. An undergraduate program was initiated in 1989.

We currently have 15 faculty members, 3 lecturers, 5 technical support staff, and 4 research programmers affiliated with specific funding. The graduate program contains 61 MS students, 22 PhD candidates: the undergraduate program has 205 bachelors students and 400+ pre-majors. There are currently three Computing Laboratories available: Harvill 332 b (houses a 31-station Pentium based Windows 2000 instructional lab), Gould-Simpson 228 (contains a 50-station Xterm & Pentium based Windows 2000 instructional lab), and the Research Lab in Gould-Simpson 748/756. Students receive accounts on both the main instructional machine, Lecture, (a multiprocessor, Sun Sparc Server running the Solaris operating system), and on the Windows 2000 network.

All systems have access to 100 Mb switched Ethernet connections and direct Internet connectivity. The Gould-Simpson Research Lab contains numerous Pentium Windows 2000/Linux OS systems, specialized printers, graphics devices, and PC clusters. Our largest computing cluster is a 64-node Pentium cluster, our newest, a 16-node Pentium cluster supporting non blocking, switched Gigabit ethernet. Two Network Appliance file servers with over 200 GB's of available file storage provide shared data across systems.

The Research Lab is used by graduate students and faculty for research projects. The Computer Science department is located on the 7th floor of Gould-Simpson, with offices on the 8th floor, Bio Sciences East 3rd floor, and labs on the 2nd floor of GS and the 3rd floor of the Harvill building. Our Academic Services Office is located in room 725 of Gould-Simpson.