A Message from the Chair

The UCSD Computer Science and Engineering department has experienced rapid growth in the number of faculty, the number of students and the diversity of our research. Concretely, a majority of our fifty faculty members were hired over the last seven years. During this same time we have expanded into new areas including bioinformatics, computer vision, graphics, and embedded systems, while we have become a leading institution in areas ranging from cryptography to networking. Our department now includes over 300 graduate students, 200 of which are in the Ph.D. program, and we have over 800 students majoring in our Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Bioinformatics undergraduate programs. Both of our graduate programs in Computer Science and Computer Engineering are in the top twenty in the nation and the Sloan survey of national graduate programs places us in the top five in student satisfaction. Our junior faculty routinely receive NSF CAREER awards (18 in total) and have received five Sloan fellowships in the last five years alone, while 12 of our senior faculty have been named fellows of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, or National Academies. We even have a faculty member who recently won an Academy Award--Professor Henrik Wann Jensen, whose work on accurately rendering the appearance of skin is now routinely used in Hollywood animated features and special effects.

Graduates of our undergraduate program are placing into positions at leading companies such as Google, Microsoft, Sun and Cisco and into top Ph.D. programs including MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Washington. Similarly, many of our Ph.D. graduates have been hired into faculty positions at top universities including Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Wisconsin (Madison), Texas (Austin), Maryland, Georgia Tech, Duke, Massachusetts (Amherst), Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, as well as our own University of California system, or into research departments of top companies such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Google.

Some other highlights include:

• In the last two years, we hired seven new faculty members, including Yoav Freund (machine learning), Ranjit Jhala (model checking), Sorin Lerner (compilers and programming languages), Beth Simon (educational and information technology), Tajana Rosing (wireless media and embedded systems), Michael Taylor (architecture) and YY Zhou (systems).
• Serge Belongie, Henrik Wann Jensen, and Stefan Savage were recently named Sloan Research Fellows.
• Russell Impagliazzo was named a Guggenheim Fellow in April 2004.
• Multiple cover stories in Science and Nature have highlighted the bioinformatics research of Eleazar Eskin and Pavel Pevzner.
• Over the past five years, CSE student teams have consistently won or placed in the top three in ACM regional programming contests, thereby qualifying to compete in four ACM ICPC World Finals.
• CSE faculty recently founded the multidisciplinary Center for Networked Systems in partnership with AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, QUALCOMM, and Sun Microsystems. The partners have committed $9 million over three years to help investigate the unique problems of large-scale networks and distributed systems.
• The CSE-led Cooperative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses was recently named one of four national NSF CyberTrust centers, with an initial budget of over $7M to investigate large-scale Internet security threats.
• Our new $41 million CSE building was completed, and we moved in this summer. At nearly 87,000 assignable square feet, the building is designed to accommodate the infrastructural needs of our department for decades to come.
• Finally, the CSE department plays a leading role in several research centers that provide our graduate students and faculty with unique research opportunities. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), headed by CSE professor Fran Berman, is an international leader in high-performance computing. The California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-[IT]2), led by CSE professor Larry Smarr, is a premier research center for the technologies that will shape the information and communication systems of tomorrow.

The atmosphere within our department is bracing: there is a strong sense of community and intellectual vigor. This is a wonderfully exciting time for us, and it is a great department in which to reach one's full potential.