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There are many ways to measure the quality of a Computer Science
department. By almost any measure URCS does very well.
The URCS faculty includes 15 tenure-track professors
(James Allen,
Jeff Bigham,
Chris Brown,
Chen Ding,
Sandhya Dwarkadas,
Daniel Gildea,
Lane Hemaspaandra,
Engin Ipek,
Henry Kautz,
Randal Nelson,
Len Schubert,
Michael Scott,
Joel Seiferas,
Kai Shen,
Daniel Stefankovic),
one research professor
(George Ferguson),
one teaching professor
(Ted Pawlicki),
one research scientist
(Mary Swift),
and 5 affiliated faculty members, from Brain and Cognitive Science
(Robbie Jacobs,
Forian Jaeger,
David Knill)
and Electrical and Computer Engineering
(Wendi Heinzelman,
Michael Huang).
Prof. Henry Kautz became President Elect of the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the professional
organization of AI researchers, in 2009.
- Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science:
Kautz
- Fellow, American Association for Artificial Intelligence:
Allen, Kautz, Schubert
- Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery: Scott
- Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize
in Distributed Computing: Scott, 2006
- Friedrich
Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation: Hemaspaandra, 2006
- IJCAI Computers and
Thought Award, Kautz, 1989
- Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator:
Ding
- IBM Faculty Development award:
Scott
- NSF CAREER award:
Ding, Dwarkadas, Gildea, Heinzelman, Shen
- NSF Postdoctoral fellowship:
Dwarkadas
- NSF Presidential Young Investigator:
Allen, Hemaspaandra
- NSF Research Initiation Award:
Hemaspaandra, Nelson
- ONR Young Investigator Award:
Heinzelman
- UofR Bridging Fellowship:
Hemaspaandra
- UofR Curtis Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching:
Allen
- UofR Goergen Award for Outstanding Achievement and
Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching:
Scott
- UofR Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a
Non-tenured Member of the Faculty: Heinzelman
- Best Paper Award, Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society, 2006: Jacobs, with student Manu Chhabra
- Best Student Paper Award, ACM Conference on Principles and
Practice of Parallel Programming, 2006: Scott student Bill
Scherer (republished as a Technical Highlights selection in
Communications of the ACM, May 2009)
- Best Paper Award, International Conference on High Performance
Computing, 2005: Scott, with students Bijun He and Bill Scherer
- Most Popular Poster Presentation Award, ACM Conference on Principles
of Distributed Computing, 2005: Scott, with student Bill Scherer
- Best Paper Award, Usenix Annual Technical Conference, 2004:
Scott, with student Thanos Papathanasiou
Graduate students are the lifeblood of a CS research program.
As of May 2009, the department has 42 Ph.D. students.
Of these, 16 are US citizens. The rest come from a
variety of countries around the world, including
Bangladesh,
China,
Colombia,
India,
Greece,
Italy,
Iraq,
and
Iran.
Eight (19%) are women.
URCS students frequently lead the College in GRE scores and University
Fellowships.
(For the entering classes of 2006–2008, Median verbal and
quantitative GRE scores were 590 and 780, respectively.)
Many students are supported by external corporate and foundation
fellowships. All others receive full department stipends, and all receive
tuition waivers.
At the undergraduate level, the department graduates about 30 majors a
year, many of whom are actively involved in research.
Department teams are regular competitors in the international CS Games; Rochester teams took first place
in 2006 and 2007.
The undergraduate
mobile robot team took first place in the 2002
AAAI mobile robot host
competition.
Andrew Uzilov received an NSF Graduate
Research Fellowship in 2007.
David Eisenstat took first place, nationwide, in the 2006
Outstanding Undergraduate Award
program of the
Computing Research Association.
Pete Barnum and Micha Elsner received honorable mention in the 2005
competition.
Gautam Altekar was a finalist in 2004; Al Robinson received honorable
mention.
There is an active undergraduate council, a student chapter of the ACM,
and a Computer
Interest Floor in the undergraduate dorms.
Between 1980 and 2008, URCS awarded
168 Ph.D. degrees.
URCS graduate alumni have gone on to outstanding careers in academia and
industry.
Danny Sabbah (Ph.D. 1982) is Vice President for AIM Development at IBM.
Rick Rashid (Ph.D. 1980) is Senior Vice President for Research at Microsoft.
Avi Tevanian (M.S. 1984)
went on to earn a Ph.D. at CMU, and was Chief Technology Officer of
Apple from 1997 to 2006.
Corinna Cortes (Ph.D. 1994) is head of Google’s New York City lab.
In 2008 she shared the ACM
Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
for the development of Support Vector Machines.
Peter Dibble (Ph.D. 1990) is a principal architect of the Real Time Specification for Java.
A little over a third of the department’s Ph.D. alumni have
gone on to academic careers.
At least 34 now hold senior faculty positions, at
Boston University (Crovella);
Carnegie Mellon University (Schneider);
Colgate University (Sanchis [deceased]);
Concordia University (Narayanan);
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (Meira);
Florida International University (T. Li);
Nassau Community College (Sher);
Ohio State University (Parthasarathy);
Pacific Lutheran University (Hauser);
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Zaki);
Rice University (Cox, Mellor-Crummey);
Rutgers University (Kahrs, Bianchini);
The National University of Singapore (Jain);
The Rochester Institute of Technology (Heliotis, Homan, Vallino);
The State University of New York at Albany (Haas);
Towson University (Zimand);
The University of Alberta, Canada (Jägersand);
The University of California at San Diego (Cottrell);
The University of Crete (Markatos);
The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo (Tarui);
The University of Essex, England (Poesio);
The University of Florida (Newman);
The University of Leicester (Raman);
The University of Maryland (Aloimonos, Perlis);
The University of Massachusetts (McCallum);
The University of Pittsburgh (Litman);
The University of Rochester (Kautz);
The University of Washington, Seattle (Rao);
The University of Washington, Tacoma (Tenenberg);
The University of Texas, El Paso (Fuentes);
The University of York, England (Frisch);
Washington University in St. Louis (Loui);
and the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh (Kyburg).
At least 37 more recent grads hold junior academic positions.
In industry and government service, URCS graduate alumni are members of
technical staff at many of the world’s leading research labs, including
IBM (13),
Microsoft (8),
Google (8),
Bell Labs (2),
Intel (3),
Xerox (3),
Cisco (2),
GE (2),
NEC (2),
Amazon,
Ask Jeeves,
the Canadian Space Agency,
Equinox,
Kodak,
Lockheed Martin,
Los Alamos,
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
Sarnoff,
Siemens,
Sprint,
Sun,
Texas Instruments,
VMware,
and Yahoo.
While larger departments can boast larger numbers of distinguished
alumni, the overall quality of professional placements from URCS is hard
to beat.
Over the years, research at Rochester has changed the face of Computer
Science.
The algorithms and complexity theory research group at the
University of Rochester has made many field-shaping contributions, both
foundational and applied. These are described on the URCS
theory contributions web page.
Drawing inspiration from biological vision systems,
Chris Brown, former faculty member Dana Ballard, and students developed the
active vision paradigm, embedding computer vision in the
physical world, applying it to concrete tasks, and leveraging
information from moving camera platforms and task-specific knowledge.
Freed from a focus on the static analysis of images, computer vision
research blossomed in the 1980s.
More recently, ground-breaking research in neural models of
behavior has leveraged virtual reality to provide a powerful new
window into the processes of human cognition, allowing researchers to
control perception and measure response with
unprecedented accuracy.
Interval-based temporal logic, developed by James Allen and his
students, is now the standard temporal formalism for much of artificial
intelligence and natural language processing, and forms the basis for
much recent work on temporal ontologies. The language group at
Rochester has also made seminal contributions to speech-act plan-based
models of dialogue, including the first computational models of
intention recognition for language understanding, the first multi-level
plan representations for capturing dialogue intentions, and the most
influential formalization of the plan recognition process. Rochester’s
TRIPS
system
is probably the most sophisticated fully-functional spoken
dialogue system in the world today.
Henry Kautz has made fundamental contributions to the field of efficient
common-sense inference, including the planning as satisfiability
framework. A 1987 URCS alum, Kautz recently joined the faculty after an
illustrious career at Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and the University of
Washington.
In parallel computing, the Rochester Intelligent Gateway project
of the late 1970s and early 1980s laid the groundwork for modern
network-centric operating systems, and is a direct ancestor of such
commercially important systems as OSF Unix and MacOS X. In the
mid-1980s, Rochester’s 128-node BBN Butterfly Parallel Processor was
the largest shared-memory multiprocessor in the world. Work with the
Butterfly influenced a whole generation of parallel operating systems
and applications. The work of former faculty member Tom LeBlanc and his
students helped shape
the field of parallel program debugging and performance analysis.
Michael Scott’s work with URCS alum John Mellor-Crummey served to launch
the field of scalable
synchronization. Their MCS queue lock has been adopted by many
commercial libraries and operating systems.
Nonblocking data structures developed by
Scott and his students are part of the Java standard library.
Sandhya Dwarkadas’s work on the Treadmarks
and FASTLINK
systems played a major role in the discovery of the gene responsible for
Parkinson’s disease.
Kai Shen's work on cluster management forms the backbone of Internet
search site Ask.com.
For further information on current research programs, try the following links:
Much of the department’s research spans traditional boundaries not only
among subareas of computer science, but between computer science and
other allied fields.
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The Center for Future Health aims to empower
individuals in their health care by developing technologies inexpensive
and user-friendly enough to deploy in the home, rather than the doctor’s
office or hospital. Several CS faculty, including
James Allen,
George Ferguson,
Wendi Heinzelman,
and
Randal Nelson,
are actively involved.
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Henry Kautz brings to the University of Rochester an ambitious
initiative in Assisted
Cognition, which aims to create computer systems to help people
suffering from cognitive disorders, such as the effects of
Alzheimer’s
disease. Fundamental and applied problems in this project range over
such diverse topics as probabilistic reasoning, plan recognition,
ubiquitous computing, data fusion, user interfaces, and cognitive
psychology.
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The Center for Language
Sciences is an interdisciplinary center spanning Linguistics,
Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Computer Science,
Engineering, and Philosophy. It fosters research both within and
between these more traditional disciplines, through a colloquium
series, workshops, access to working papers, formal coursework in
contributing departments, shared laboratory and computational
facilities, and a pre- and post-doctoral training grant from the
National Institutes of Health.
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The Computer Systems and
Engineering Group is a joint venture of the departments of Computer Science and
Electrical and Computer Engineering.
As of summer 2009 it has a faculty of ten.
Of these, one (Ipek) has a joint position shared between the two
departments.
Two (Heinzelman and Huang) have primary appointments in ECE and
secondary appointments in CS.
One (Dwarkadas) has a primary appointment in CS and a secondary
appointment in ECE. The group functions smoothly as a
cross-department entity: there are jointly supervised students,
joint papers, joint meetings, and joint grants. Among other topics,
cross-department projects are addressing
power-aware system design, adaptive architectures, and wireless computing.
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During a Bridging Fellowship at the UR Political Science
Department, Lane Hemaspaandra started a research project that now
includes researchers at three Rochester-area schools, on the
computational complexity of voting and apportionment systems.
Among other things, this work has revealed that determining the winner
in a famous voting system proposed by Lewis Carroll in 1876 is
complete for parallel access to NP.
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Members of the CS department are among the most active constituents of the
University's Center for Research
Computing, which provides high-end computational resources and
coordinates cross-disciplinary research. Michael Scott serves on the CRC
steering committee.
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The University’s Laboratory
for Laser Energetics houses the world’s most powerful X-ray laser,
and is the leading site for research in (laser-induced) inertial
confinement fusion. Members of the Computer Systems group (Scott,
Dwarkadas, and Shen) have collaborated with colleagues at LLE on the
high-end computer simulations that drive the understanding of
experimental results and the design of future experiments.
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Members of the CS faculty maintain active research ties with several other
UR departments and centers. They routinely serve on
Ph.D. committees in other departments, and co-supervise
interdisciplinary degrees.
Members of the department maintain active collaborations with colleagues
around the world.
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James Allen has received funding from NSF for a collaborative project with
the spoken dialogue group at IIMAS in Mexico City, headed by
Luis Pineda.
They are working on examining how well the Rochester spoken dialogue system
can be used for Spanish.
- Lane Hemaspaandra is part of the research team on the
7-country EUROCORES/LogICCC grant Computational Foundations of
Social Choice, which is supported by the ESF and the NSF. He will
visit the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and many European
Universities as part of this project. He has also long
worked closely with researchers from Japan and Germany, participating
in three NSF international collaboration grants (one with Japan and two with
Germany) and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation TransCoop collaboration
grant with Germany, and receiving the Humboldt Foundation's Friedrich
Wilhelm Bessel Research Award. He has worked particularly closely
with Hempel, Rothe, Wagner, Watanabe, and Wechsung, and is, jointly
with Erdelyi, Faliszewski, Rothe, and Spakowski, studying
frequency-of-correctness and election-complexity issues.
- Lenhart Schubert is working with Alfonso Gerevini of the University
of Brescia, Italy, on the DISCOPLAN
system for automated discovery of state invariants
(“laws”) in planning domains. Such invariants have been
used to speed up automated planning by orders of magnitude.
- The department hosts a steady stream of postdocs and long-term
research visitors in a variety of research areas. Recent countries of
origin have included Argentina, Brazil, China,
Germany, Italy, The Netherlands,
Portugal,
and Russia (as well as the United States), many of them supported by
highly competitive international fellowship programs.
Closer to home, the department works with several groups at nearby
schools.
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Michael Scott’s
Programming
Language Pragmatics
(Morgan Kaufmann, Third edition 2009)
addresses the fundamental principles at work in the most important
contemporary languages. It highlights the critical relationship
between language design and language implementation, and devotes
special attention to issues of importance to the expert programmer.
With adoptions at
over 150 schools,
it occupies the #2 sales position in the field.
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Hemaspaandra and Torenvliet’s Theory of
Semi-Feasible Algorithms (Springer-Verlag, 2003) presents the
first consolidated survey of the vibrant field of research known as
the theory of semi-feasible algorithms. It showcases the richness
of, and contrasts between, the central notions of complexity:
running time, nonuniform complexity, lowness, and NP-hardness.
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Hemaspaandra and Mitsunori Ogihara’s
The
Complexity Theory Companion
(Springer-Verlag, 2002)
is an accessible, algorithmically oriented, research-centered,
up-to-date guide to some of the most interesting techniques of
complexity theory. The book’s thesis is that simple algorithms are
at the heart of complexity theory.
Its proof methods are algorithmic, and to highlight the role of
algorithmic techniques, it is organized by technique rather than by
topic.
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James Allen’s
Natural Language Understanding
(Addison-Wesley, 2nd edition, 1995), is the leading text in the field.
It delivers a synthesis of the major modern techniques and the most
current research in natural language processing. The approach is
unique in its coverage of semantic interpretation and discourse
alongside the foundational material in syntactic processing.
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Reasoning About Plans
(Morgan Kaufmann, 1991), co-written by James Allen,
Henry Kautz, Josh Tenenberg, and Richard Pelavin, presents
an integrated framework for temporal reasoning, planning, and plan
recognition.
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Ballard and Brown’s
Computer Vision
(Prentice Hall, 1982) was for many years the defining text for the
field, and remains to this day a central resource for computer
vision research.
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Though the focus at Rochester is on long-term research, we value
our many ties to industry, and endeavor to transfer our work into
practice whenever appropriate.
- Working with Virtual
Research and Applied
Science Laboratories, our virtual reality group was the first to
integrate eye tracking into a head-mount display for high-resolution
real-time monitoring of user focus in virtual environments.
- Our virtual reality group has also worked with Sensable Technologies to create the
first haptic (force feedback) system able to cover an entire table-top
environment with a two-fingered grip touch interface.
- Chen Ding’s work on Memory Reference Affinity (with student Xipeng Shen, now on faculty at the
College of William and Mary) has been implemented in IBM’s C/C++ and
Fortran production compilers, leading to dramatic speedups on several of
the SPECfp 2000 benchmarks.
- Mellor-Crummey & Scott queued spin locks have been incorporated into a
variety of academic and commercial systems, including Compaq’s True64 Unix, IBM’s K42 multiprocessor OS,
and Mercury Computer Corp.’s parallel
real-time OS.
- Michael & Scott’s
lock-free queues have been incorporated into the
Java 5 standard library.
- Scherer & Scott’s
Exchanger
and
SynchronousQueue
algorithms (co-developed with Doug Lea
of SUNY Oswego) have been adopted for
Java 6.
- Department research has resulted in a variety of patents and
pending applications, including music
feature extraction, the Cashmere-2L coherence protocol, scalable queue locks with
timeout, and several aspects of
Complexity-Adaptive
Processing.
- Department research has been supported in recent years by financial
or equipment donations from Boeing, Compaq, IBM, Intel, Kodak, Mercury,
Microsoft, and Sun.
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The 1993 NRC
rankings of research-doctorate programs
in computer science placed URCS 30th in the nation overall. These
statistics are strongly correlated with size (see
scatterplot). On more size-independent submetrics, URCS ranked
- 5th in publications per faculty member
- 14th in citations per faculty member
- 14th in the effectiveness of the graduate program
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Rochester had the rare distinction of receiving continuous
funding from the National Science Foundation
Research
Infrastructure program from 1984 to 2005. Also known by the earlier
names CER (Coordinated Experimental Research) and IIP (Institutional
Infrastructure Program), RI grants fund the acquisition of unique,
large-scale hardware resources for interdisciplinary work. At Rochester
these grants recognized ground-breaking collaboration among researchers
in Computer Systems, Spatial AI, Symbolic AI, and Theory.
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With an annual budget of over $4M, and research expenditures around
$3M, URCS external funding averages around $200K/faculty
member per year. While larger departments often have larger total
budgets, per capita funding at Rochester is very strong.
URCS Research facilities are by any measure outstanding (see separate page).
Significant hardware donations
in recent years have come from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun.
Current department resources include a 32-processor
IBM
pSeries 690 (“Regatta”) machine,
8- and 16-processor
SunFire
multiprocessors, 32- and 128-core Sun Niagara machines.
The department also enjoys easy access to a 672-core Linux cluster and a
1024-core IBM BlueGene/P machine at the University's Center for Research Computing.
URCS was founded as a Ph.D.-only department in 1974. The first degrees
were awarded in 1980. The department typically admits 10–12
Ph.D. students each fall, and graduates about 7 every year. Time to
completion of the Ph.D. is just over 5 years on average. The
department also offers a “3-2” combined B.S./M.S. program,
and a small professional Master’s program.
While the department has taught undergraduates from the outset (largely
through the Applied Mathematics: Computer Science program in the Math
department), it did not administer its own B.S. and B.A. programs until
1995, with the first degrees awarded in the spring of 1996.
In 2004 the department received the University’s Goergen award for
curricular achievement.
As noted above, the National Research Council ranked
URCS 14th in the nation in the “effectiveness of the graduate
program”.
James Allen has received the University’s Curtis award for graduate teaching.
Michael Scott has received the University’s Goergen award for
undergraduate teaching.
Wendi Heinzelman has received the University’s Curtis award for
teaching by a non-tenured member of the faculty.
Most other top-ranked departments are 3 to 4 times our size. Smallness
has an impact, of course, on the total number of students and
publications, the total size of the budget, the total number of alumni,
etc., but it does not have an impact on the things that really
matter: the output of the department per person, and the
quality of the research, the people, and the programs.
While it is difficult for a small department to compete with the sheer
volume and variety of work at larger schools, there are significant
advantages to being small. Many of these advantages impact quality
of life, making URCS a great place to work or to get a degree.
Many, however, impact research quality as well, inspiring us to do
research that we probably wouldn’t do at a larger school.
- Cross-disciplinary focus —
As noted above, the department places a heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary work. Small size
facilitates this emphasis: groups naturally seek each other out to
help build critical mass.
At the University level, administrative policies make it
easy to share funding and appointments across departments and
schools. More locally, the department deliberately encourages
“cross fertilization” by mixing student office space by
area: the typical room houses students with three different research
advisiors, working in AI, Systems, and Theory.
- Personal attention —
With about 3–4 Ph.D. students per faculty member, on average,
doctoral candidates receive a great deal of personal attention.
Most students become active in research during their first year of
graduate study. Beyond that first year, most learning occurs
one-on-one or in small groups at the whiteboard, rather than in a
classroom setting.
- Communal resource model —
The department pools financial resources to the maximum extent
consistent with granting agency guidelines. Every Ph.D. student is
guaranteed support throughout the course of graduate studies,
regardless of choice of advisor or research topic. A
department-wide committee coordinates all major equipment purchases,
to maximize the potential to meet multiple research needs.
Machines are then uniformly available to all faculty, grad students,
visitors, and postdocs. All Unix machines run a common
password file, and all file systems are universally cross-mounted,
so one can log on anywhere and feel at home.
- Collaborative decision making —
Because the entire faculty will fit around one table, decisions can
be made almost entirely by consensus. Graduate student
representatives serve on all department committees, and play a major
role in graduate admissions, facilities, and curricular development.
- Collegial atmosphere —
Because everyone in the department knows everyone else, the social
and professional atmosphere is unusually warm and collegial. There
are weekly parties, and department teams in various intramural sports
leagues.
Recently ranked as one of the Northeast’s 10 “Best Places to Live in
America” by Money magazine, Rochester has also been listed as one
of the “Most Livable Cities” in America by Partners for
Livable Communities, a rating based on Rochester’s technology-focused
economy, recreational opportunities, and historic neighborhoods.
There is a thriving arts and entertainment scene, fueled in part by the
UR’s own Eastman School of
Music (the number one music school in the country). There is a wide
variety of affordable housing within easy distance of campus. The
surrounding countryside is gorgeous. There are four real seasons, each
with its distinctive charm, and contrary to rumors you may have
heard, winter is not significantly longer than the other three :-).
For more information on the Greater Rochester Area, check out the pages
maintained by the UR
Public Relations Department and the
UR Admissions
Office.
To learn more about department life and academic programs, or to apply
to the Ph.D. program, CLICK
HERE.
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