August 2013

The Department of Computer Science (CS@VT) is within the College of Engineering  at Virginia Tech.  Founded in 1970, the department has grown to 36 energetic, engaged tenure-track faculty, 11 research faculty, 2 senior instructors and 3 academic advisors.  Our department is characterized by its emphasis on interdisciplinary research and diversity and its collegial atmosphere. The main campus of Virginia Tech is in Blacksburg, Virginia; a graduate center in northern Virginia is home to several CS faculty.

A few words about our recent accomplishments….  Our faculty has received 6 NSF/DOE CAREER Awards since 2008;  CS@VT faculty have a total 12 NSF/DOE CAREER awards. Faculty collaborate actively with industry including recently with IBM Research, HP Research, Microsoft Research, NVIDIA, AMD and NetApps.  Our research expenditures during fiscal year 2013 were $11.7 million dollars; total research funding at the beginning of fiscal year 2013 was $34 million.   We have an active industrial partners program, Computer Science Resources Consortium (CSRC)  with over 85 member companies.

The department offers BS, MS and PhD degrees, with a Fall 2013 enrollment of approximately 550 undergraduate majors (~12% women), 167 PhD and 61 MS students.  During academic year 2012-2013, we graduated 33 PhD students, of whom 24% were women.  Usually on average we graduate 15-20 PhD students annually. In the same time period, we graduated 128 BS and 35 MS students.  We emphasize both capstone and research experiences for our undergraduate students, and also provide a 5 year BS/MS degree.

Our larger research groups include three centers.   The new interdisciplinary Discovery Analytics Center (DAC)  focuses on ‘big data’ problems in areas of national interest including intelligence analysis, sustainability and health informatics.  The Center for Human Computer Interaction (CHCI) supports research in visualization, 3D interfaces, virtual reality, usability,  and personal information systems. The Center for High End Computing Systems (CHECS) is known for its expertise in high performance computing, including energy efficient and/or heterogeneous supercomputers.  Recently, we designed and acquired HokieSpeed, a CPU/GPU 200+ node machine for use by computational scientists and engineers across campus through a $2M NSF MRI grant.   HokieSpeed ranked 11^th in the world on the Green 500 List in November 2011.  CS faculty also participate in the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology, a cyber security center.

We were given an Exemplary Department Award by the university in 2008 on the strength of our interdisciplinary research across campus.   We also are proud that the Wall Street Journal survey of industrial recruiters in Fall 2010 that named CS@VT fifth among CS departments in the US in terms of the desirability of recruiting our students. 

We are actively working for diversity in computing.  CS@VT faculty serve as leaders of the Coalition to Diversity Computing  and National Center for Women in IT (NCWIT), with emphasis on engagement with the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, NCWIT Pacesetters and founding leadership of the VA/DC Aspirations in Computing Awards. 

I invite you to explore our website further.  We welcome contacts from potential students or research collaborators.

Sincerely,

Dr. Barbara G. Ryder

J. Byron Maupin Professor of Engineering