Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A photo of the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science
|
|
| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Established | 1964 (1949 as the Digital Computer Laboratory |
| Department Head | Rob A. Rutenbar until July 2017 , Vikram Adve (interim) |
| Location | Urbana, Illinois, United States of America |
| Colors |
Illinois Blue Illinois Orange |
| Website | cs |
The Department of Computer Science (CS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has consistently been ranked as a top computer science program in the world. As of 2016, U.S. News & World Report rank UIUC's Computer Science as a Top 5 CS Graduate School program in the nation, and one of the Top 5 Undergraduate Schools in Computers, along with being in the Top 20 for the World's Best Universities for Computer Science. Since its reorganization in 1964, the Department of Computer Science has produced a myriad of publications and research that have advanced the field of Computer Science. In addition, many faculty and alumni have been leads with modern-day applications such as Mosaic (web browser), PayPal, and YouTube.
In 1949, the University of Illinois created the Digital Computer Laboratory following the joint funding between the University and the U.S. Army to create the ORDVAC and ILLIAC I computers under the direction of physicist Ralph Meagher. The ORDVAC and ILLIAC computers the two earliest von-Neumann architecture machines to be constructed. Once completed in 1952, the ILLIAC I inspired machines such as the MISTIC, MUSASINO-1, SILLIAC, and CYCLONE, as well as providing the impetus for the university to continue its research in computing through the ILLIAC II project. Yet despite such advances in high-performance computing, faculty at the Digital Computer Laboratory continued to conduct research in other fields of computing as well, such as in Human-Computer Interaction through the PLATO project, the first computer music (the ILLIAC Suite), computational numerical methods through the work of Donald B. Gillies, and James E. Robertson, the 'R' co-inventor of the SRT division algorithm, to name a few. Given this explosion in research in computing, in 1964, the University of Illinois reorganized the Digital Computer Laboratory into the Department of Computer Science, and by 1967, the department awarded its first PhD and Master's degrees in Computer Science. In 1982, UIUC physicist Larry Smarr wrote a blistering critique of America's supercomputing resources, and as a result the National Science Foundation established the UIUC's National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1985. NCSA was one of the first places in industry or academia to develop software for the 3 major operating systems at the time - Macintosh, PC, and UNIX. NCSA in 1986 released NCSA Telnet and in 1993 it released the Mosaic web browser. In 2004, the Department of Computer Science moved out of the Digital Computer Laboratory building into the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science following a gift from alumnus Thomas Siebel.
...
Wikipedia