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| Computing activities began at Iowa
State University in the 1930s with Professor John
Vincent Atanasoff's work on designing and building the
world's first electronic digital computer. The Department
of Computer Science at Iowa State University was established
in 1969, offering from the outset, B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D.
degrees. |
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The department currently has 28 full-time tenured or tenure-track
faculty, 5 lecturers, and 9 adjunct
or affiliate faculty. In the past three years the department decided
to strategically grow its graduate
program and hire faculty into experimental and applied areas of
Computer Science while maintaining and enhancing our current strengths
and taking advantage of opportunities in emerging interdisciplinary
areas. The department currently has about 100 resident Ph.D.
students, about 50 M.S. students,
and approximately 400 undergraduate majors. Our students are among
the best in the nation, both graduate and undergraduate. In 2004
the department's Computer Society International Design Competition
(CSIDC) team, developed the Spatial Cues system, won the
Third Place overall among 250 team from 144 universities, in 28
countries in the "World Final" and the Microsoft Software
Engineering Award. We need our alumni to help popularize the department
achievements and help recruit the best students from Iowa and the
nation to join. The B.S. and M.S. degree recipients from our department
are highly sought after by industry. Our recent Ph.D. graduates
have typically taken up either academic positions or leadership
roles in industrial research laboratories.
The Department of Computer Science has strong research
programs in several areas of Computer Science including: Algorithms,
Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology,
Computational Complexity, Databases, Parallel and Distributed Computing,
Programming Languages, Multimedia Systems, Communication Networks
and Operating Systems, Software Systems, Software Engineering, and
Theory of Computation. The department is a key participant in the
interdepartmental graduate programs in Bioinformatics
and Computational Biology, Human-Computer
Interaction, Information
Assurance, Complex
Adaptive Systems, and Neuroscience.
Computer Science faculty are leading a new initiative aimed at fostering
cross-disciplinary research and graduate training in Computational
Intelligence, Learning, and Discovery. Excellent faculty, state-of-the-art
research laboratories, a well-funded research program, opportunities
provided by the Laurence
H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological statistics,
Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery Initiative, the
DOE Ames
Laboratory, Information Infrastructure Institute, the Virtual
Reality Applications Center, and the Information
Assurance Center provide a stimulating academic environment
that nurtures leading edge research and innovative education in
Computer Science. Research and graduate training activities led
by Computer Science faculty are funded by several sources including
the National Science
Foundation, the National
Institutes of Health, the Department
of Defense, NASA
as well as private foundations and industry. At present, the active
research and training grants in which Computer Science faculty participate
as principal or co-principal investigators add up to approximately
$20 million.
Iowa State University
is a major land-grant university located in Ames,
Iowa. It is also
one of the leading research universities in the United States. Ames
is a pleasant small yet cosmopolitan city with a population of 50,000
(25,000 students), a vibrant cultural scene, and a secondary school
system that ranks among the best in United States. It is within
convenient driving distance from Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis,
and Omaha which offer a broad range of cultural and entertainment
opportunities. Ames has been ranked among the best places to live
and work in the United States. I welcome you to visit us and please
do feel free to drop by my office for a talk. |
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