Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 15:09:15 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Overview of UW Computer Science & Engineering

An Overview of the
University of Washington
Department of Computer Science & Engineering


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

The University of Washington

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 -- 1994 data is the most recent available -- UW is second behind Johns Hopkins, with MIT and Stanford in third and fourth positions. Currently UW ranks fifth in industrial research support.) The UW faculty includes eighty-six members of the National Academies, eight MacArthur Foundation award winners, and four Nobel prize winners in the past decade. Fifty seven junior faculty have won NSF/Presidential Young Investigator Awards. 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

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. The department currently has roughly 30 faculty members, 30 staff members, 150 graduate students, and 300 undergraduate students.

The department is ranked among the top ten in the nation. Fifteen CSE faculty members have won Presidential/NSF Young Investigator Awards, one of the highest totals nationally regardless of discipline, and more than 1/4 of the University of Washington's total of this prestigious award. Three faculty members are ONR Young Investigator Award recipients, two hold Presidential Faculty Fellow Awards, and one holds a Sloan Research Fellowship. Among the senior faculty are seven Fulbright recipients, two Guggenheim recipients, nine 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, two have received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award, and one is the first member of the College of Engineering to be named the University of Washington Annual Faculty Lecturer. Dick Karp, the latest addition to our faculty, brings with from him UC Berkeley a host of honors including the Turing Award and membership in both National Academies; in his first year at the University of Washington, Karp was awarded the National Medal of Science.

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

A Research Overview

We are active in most of the principal areas of computer science and computer engineering. Particular strengths include:

VLSI, Embedded Systems, and CAD: Gaetano Borriello, Carl Ebeling, Ted Kehl, and Larry Snyder

Computer Architecture: Jean-Loup Baer, Susan Eggers, Hank Levy, Larry Snyder, and Arun Somani

Operating Systems, Networks, and Communication: Brian Bershad, Ed Lazowska, Hank Levy, Alan Shaw, and John Zahorjan

Programming Systems: Alan Borning, Craig Chambers, Susan Eggers, and Larry Snyder

Software Engineering, Safety, and Human-Computer Interaction: Nancy Leveson, David Notkin, and Alan Shaw

Computer Graphics and Computer Vision: David Salesin, Linda Shapiro, and Steve Tanimoto

Artificial Intelligence: Oren Etzioni, Steve Hanks, Alistair Holden, Steve Tanimoto, and Dan Weld

Theory of Computation: Richard Anderson, Paul Beame, Anna Karlin, Dick Karp, Richard Ladner, Larry Ruzzo, Martin Tompa, and Paul Young

Computational Biology: Dick Karp, Larry Ruzzo, and Martin Tompa, in close collaboration with adjunct faculty Phil Green, Leroy Hood, and Maynard Olson

There are many research activities that cut across these areas (for example, in parallel computing), as well as a number of strong external interactions.

Olympic Coast Sunset
Olympic National Park, Washington
Photo by Dan Weld

The Graduate Program

The department has roughly 120 Ph.D. students and 20 Masters students in the full-time graduate program. We typically graduate 15 Ph.D. students and 20 Masters students each year.

We offer admission to between 10% and 15% of those who apply to our graduate program. Eight of our students received NSF Graduate Fellowships in the 1994 competition.

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. Five recent graduates have received Presidential/NSF Young Investigator Awards, two have received Presidential Faculty Fellow Awards, and one has received a Sloan Research Fellowship. Two graduates have been recognized in the ACM Distinguished Dissertation Award competition.

In Autumn 1996 we introduced an "accessible" 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 will ultimately enroll roughly 120 students.

Allen Library
University of Washington photo

The Undergraduate Program

The department has two undergraduate programs: a Computer Science degree program graduating 80 students per year, and an ABET-accredited Computer Engineering degree program graduating 40 students per year.

Students are admitted to our majors on a competitive basis upon completion of prerequisite courses. As a result, our undergraduates are strong, classes are small, and interaction with the faculty is high. (The average overall freshman/sophomore GPA among students enrolling in the Computer Science program for Autumn 1996 was roughly 3.7; among students enrolling in the Computer Engineering program it was roughly 3.8. Junior and senior classes typically have enrollments of less than 40. Undergraduate participation in research is common.)

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

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, and Teledesic. The region is home to many other companies critical to broad competitiveness: Boeing,

The Space Needle
Space Needle photo
the nation's fastest growing software industry even independent of Microsoft, significant players in bioengineering and electronics, etc. There is major activity in high performance computing (Tera Computer Company; the Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), as well as a rapidly growing biotechnology industry (Leroy Hood's NSF Science & Technology Center, plus a number of companies that either preceded or were attracted by or created by the STC). There is a burgeoning digital content industry, too.

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 more than 50 leadership companies from the region and the nation. Our UWTV-televised colloquium series and professional Masters program play significant roles in keeping the region's leading-edge workforce current.

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.


This document: http://www.cs.washington.edu/general/overview.html
lazowska@cs.washington.edu