Statue of George Washington, looking
west towards the Olympic Mountains
University of Washington photo
|
Statue of George Washington, looking west towards the Olympic Mountains University of Washington photo |
Drumheller Fountain, looking south towards Mt. Rainier University of Washington photo |
Spring in the Humanities Quadrangle University of Washington photo |
Founded in 1861, the University of Washington has 34,000 students (25,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate/professional) and 3,500 faculty (2,900 teaching and 600 research) divided into 16 schools and colleges. The University's annual operating budget is roughly $1.4 billion, 18% of which comes from the State.
The University of Washington is one of the nation's premier research universities. For more than twenty years, UW has ranked among the top five institutions in annual Federal research obligations. (Currently UW is second to Johns Hopkins, with MIT and Stanford in third and fourth positions. Currently UW ranks third nationally in industrial R&D support, fifth in licensing revenue from inventions, and ninth in private giving -- among all institutions, public and private.) The UW faculty includes roughly one hundred members of the National Academies, eight MacArthur Foundation award winners, and four Nobel prize winners in the past decade. A number of programs are ranked among the top dozen in their fields, including Atmospheric Sciences, Bioengineering, Cell and Developmental Biology, Computer Science & Engineering, Dentistry, Ecology Evolution & Behavior, Geography, Microbiology, Neurosciences, Nursing, Oceanography, Pharmacology, Physiology, Psychology, Public Health & Community Medicine, Sociology, Statistics/Biostatistics, and Zoology.
The UW home page includes an official profile, photographic tour, and pictorial history.
Steam Powered Turing Machine Computer Science & Engineering Mural Photo by Judy Watson |
The UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering was established as an inter-college graduate program in 1967. In 1975 an undergraduate program in Computer Science was added and departmental status was conferred. A second undergraduate program, in Computer Engineering, was added in 1989 when the department moved to the College of Engineering, and a Professional Masters Program was added in 1996. The department currently has roughly 30 faculty members, 30 staff members, 200 graduate students, and 300 undergraduate students.
The department is ranked among the top ten in the nation. Fifteen current CSE faculty members have won Presidential/NSF Young Investigator Awards or NSF CAREER Awards. Three faculty members are ONR Young Investigator Award recipients, three hold Presidential Faculty Fellow Awards, two hold Sloan Research Fellowships, and one, Chris Diorio, holds a Packard Fellowship. Among the senior faculty are eight Fulbright recipients, two Guggenheim recipients, ten Fellows of the ACM, and six Fellows of the IEEE. Within the University, three faculty members have received the College of Engineering Faculty Achievement Award, three have received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award, one is the first member of the College of Engineering to be named the University of Washington Annual Faculty Lecturer, and one has received the University of Washington Outstanding Public Service Award. Dick Karp, a key recent addition to our faculty, brought with from him UC Berkeley a host of honors including the Turing Award and membership in both National Academies; since his arrival at the University of Washington, Karp has been awarded the National Medal of Science by President Clinton, the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Harvey Prize from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
We strive to maintain a highly effective graduate program, two strong undergraduate programs, and an "open" culture with minimal partitioning either vertically (between faculty ranks or between faculty and students) or horizontally (between research areas).
Suzzallo Library University of Washington photo |
We are active in most of the principal areas of computer science and computer engineering. Particular strengths include:
Embedded Systems, VLSI Systems, and Reconfigurable Computing: Gaetano Borriello, Chris Diorio, Carl Ebeling, and Ted Kehl (emeritus)
Computer Architecture: Jean-Loup Baer (emeritus), Carl Ebeling, Susan Eggers, Hank Levy, Mark Oskin, and Larry Snyder
Systems and Networking: Tom Anderson, Magda Balazinska, Brian Bershad, Gaetano Borriello, Steve Gribble, Yoshi Kohno, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy, Alan Shaw (emeritus), David Wetherall, and John Zahorjan
Security and Privacy: Tom Anderson, Josh Benaloh, Brian Bershad, Dave Dittrich, James Fogarty, Steve Gribble, Dan Grossman, Neal Koblitz, Yoshi Kohno, Brian LaMacchia, James Landay, Hank Levy, John Manferdelli, Radia Perlman, Radha Poovendran, Dan Suciu, and David Wetherall
Programming Systems: Alan Borning, Craig Chambers, Susan Eggers, Dan Grossman, and Larry Snyder
Data Management and Intelligent Internet Systems: Magda Balazinska, Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Mausam, Marina Meila, Dan Suciu, and Dan Weld
Software Engineering: Gaetano Borriello, David Notkin, and Alan Shaw (emeritus)
Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, and Animation: Brian Curless, Barbara Mones, Zoran Popovic, David Salesin, Steve Seitz, Linda Shapiro, and Steve Tanimoto
Human Computer Interaction: Richard Anderson, Alan Borning, Gaetano Borriello, Oren Etzioni, James Fogarty, Richard Ladner, James Landay, Yoky Matsuoka, Zoran Popovic, Raj Rao, Steve Tanimoto, and Dan Weld
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Dieter Fox, Henry Kautz, Yoky Matsuoka, Mausam, Marina Meila, Raj Rao, Steve Tanimoto, and Dan Weld
Theory of Computation: Dave Bacon, Paul Beame, Venkatesan Guruswami, Anna Karlin, Richard Ladner, and James Lee
Computing and Biology: Chris Diorio, Raj Rao, Larry Ruzzo, and Martin Tompa, in collaboration with adjunct and affiliate faculty Amir Ben-Dor, Joseph Felsenstein, Phil Green, Leroy Hood, Bill Noble, Maynard Olson, and Benno Schwikowski
Technology in Education: Richard Anderson, Steve Tanimoto
There are many research activities that cut across these areas, as well as a number of strong external interactions.
See our graduate program poster (pdf).
Olympic Coast Sunset Olympic National Park, Washington Photo by Dan Weld |
The department has roughly 150 students in the full-time graduate program. We typically award fifteen Ph.D. degrees and twenty-five Masters degrees each year.
We offer admission to between 10% and 15% of those who apply to our graduate program.
Our recent Ph.D. graduates have received offers from essentially every top academic department and industrial research laboratory, and dozens of our recent graduates populate these strong programs.
In Autumn 1996 we introduced an "accessible" Professional Masters Program (involving a mix of distance learning and evening courses) designed for fully-employed professionals in the region's burgeoning information technology industry. This program enrolls roughly 125 students from more than two dozen leading regional firms.
There is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Computational Molecular Biology involving several departments in the biological and mathematical sciences, including Computer Science & Engineering.
Allen Library University of Washington photo |
Because Washington State has the nation's fastest growing software industry -- there currently are nearly 2000 firms -- more than two-thirds of our graduates remain in-state. In the course of their education, roughly two-thirds of our undergraduates participate in co-op, which we feel enhances the effectiveness of an undergraduate engineering education.
Winter Sunset on Mt. Rainier Mt. Rainier National Park Photo by Dan Weld |
The Puget Sound region is increasingly prominent as a national and international technology center.
Key strengths of the University of Washington include medicine, biotechnology, the physical sciences, and computing and allied areas of science and engineering. Many of the central players in "digital convergence" are headquartered here, such as McCaw (now AT&T Wireless), Geoworks, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, RealNetworks, and Teledesic. The region is home to many other companies critical to broad competitiveness: Boeing,
The Space Needle Space Needle photo |
Strong collaborations exist among these groups, and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering seeks to play a major role in the University and the region. Integration is the key: we view research, education, outreach, and impact as seamlessly interconnected. (For examples, see The Impact of a Research University: An Information Technology Perspective.) Our annual Affiliates Meeting is a forum for interaction among 75 leadership companies from the region and the nation. Our professional Masters degree program and our colloquium series (broadcast on UWTV and live on the Internet) play significant roles in keeping the region's leading-edge workforce current. Working with UW Educational Outreach, we offer nine "Extension Certificate Programs" that award roughly 300 certificates and enroll roughly 1000 students annually. We are actively involved with regional leadership organizations such as the Washington Software Alliance and the Technology Alliance.
Seattle,
consistently acclaimed as one
of the most livable cities in the nation, is a terrific place to be.
Seattle is a cosmopolitan city situated in the midst of the beauty and
diversity of the Pacific Northwest. The University of Washington is
located on Lake Washington, a few miles east of
Puget Sound. The Cascade Mountains are one hour to the
east; the Olympic Peninsula and Olympic
Mountains are two hours to the west.