The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science is the academic department encompassing the discipline of
computer science at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. According to
U.S. News & World Report, both its undergraduate and graduate programs rank in the top five among American universities,[5][6] and according to Computer Science Open Rankings,[7] the department ranks equally high in placing Ph.D. students in tenure-track positions at top universities and winning best paper awards. The department also ranks in the top two among all universities for faculty submissions to reputable journals and academic conferences, as determined by CSRankings.org.[8] From before its official founding in 1964 to today, the department's faculty members and alumni have contributed to projects including the
ORDVAC,
PLATO,
Mosaic (web browser),
JavaScript and
LLVM, and have founded companies including
Siebel Systems,
Netscape,
Mozilla,
PayPal,
Yelp,
YouTube, and
Malwarebytes.
History
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.[9] 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,[10] and as a result the
National Science Foundation established the
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.[11]
Degrees and programs
Undergraduate
The department offers 14 undergraduate degree programs, all leading to Bachelor of Science degrees, through six different colleges:
The department also sponsors a minor in computer science available to all UIUC students.
The department also offers two 5-year bachelors/masters programs through the College of Engineering: Bachelor of Science/Master of Science (B.S./M.S.) in Computer Science and Bachelors of Science/Masters of Computer Science(B.S./M.C.S.).
Master of Science in Bioinformatics (M.S. Bioinformatics)
In popular culture
In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the antagonist and sentient computer
HAL 9000 says it was made operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois which was meant to represent the
Coordinated Science Laboratory where the
ILLIAC project was conducted.[12]
Notable faculty
Sarita Adve, principal investigator for the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center
^Smarr, Larry (1982). P. D. Lax (ed.). "The supercomputer famine in american universities". The Report of the Panel on Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering.