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Chair's Welcome
Professor Jens Palsberg
October, 2011
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. Albert Einstein
In the Computer Science Department we are striving to maintain and expand our research efforts across many areas and to give our students the best possible education. In 2010 the National Research Council placed our department 9th in the nation's rankings, and I am confident that we will continue this excellence in the coming years. I am proud of our department's accomplishments and equally proud of the faculty, staff, and students who made it all happen.
Our five centers within the department have continued to flourish with new and exciting ideas and research directions . . . several with a focus on integrating computer science technology with education and patient care. CENS, partnered with UCLA's Center X, LA's Unified School District, and the Computer Science Teachers Association, is overseeing the Mobilize project, a five-year, $12M program funded by NSF to foster innovation and inventiveness, and to guarantee quality and rigorous education for all students. The Wireless Health Institute, partnered with four other UC schools and with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, is using a three-year $9.9M grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to improve the quality of patient care, while also reducing cost.
The university's technology transfer thrust is growing, and the Computer Science Department continues to foster faculty participation in start-up ventures. AutoESL, a start-up founded in 2006 by department faculty and staff, was recently acquired by an industry leader in digital programmable logic devices. MediSens is another start-up venture that evolved from our work in using computer science tools for medical applications. Currently. Currently, MediSens products are in clinical trials and are expected to be in commercial use soon.
Our faculty continues to be strong . . . both in research and in teaching. This strength is illustrated by the numerous awards and honors received by our faculty every year. In the 2010-2011 time frame, the awards and honors included IEEE and ACM achievement awards, honorary doctorates, the Dan David Prize, an NSF CAREER Award, the Rumelhart Prize, influential paper awards, and many others. Adding to the strength of our faculty are two new faculty members . . . Alexander Sherstov (computer science theory) and David Heckerman (computational systems biology).
We have experienced solid expenditure levels ($18.2M) during 2010-2011 and steady student enrollment and graduation rates. During the 2010-2011 academic year, the department had enrollments of 618 BS, 152 MS, and 219 PhD students. Companies pursue our students well before graduation, and multiple job offers are common. The balanced education across many areas of computer science will be our students' foundation for life-long learning and for contributing to society.
