Cornell Computer Science Department is turning 50! Come celebrate with us, on campus in Ithaca, Sept 30 – Oct 2!
CIS is celebrating as well. We're featuring content celebrating the legacy of the Computer Science department on our website. Look for the 50th Anniversary symbol on stories, resources, and pages of our site.
Now, a letter from the Computer Science Department Chair, Fred B. Schneider ‘75:
We’ve come a long way in those 50 years, and we have lots to celebrate. In January, we moved into Gates Hall, a striking new building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne. And that small PhD-only theory-focused department now is a significant presence in the other areas of Computer Science too, with a 35 full time tenure-track faculty, plus another 5 lecturers. There are 135 PhD students, and last year we awarded 9 PhD degrees, 100 MEng degrees, and 134 Bachelors degrees. The department also has a significant presence at Cornell’s NYC Tech Campus.
It’s quite a distinguished faculty, too. Turing and Infossys award winners, members of the National Academies, MacArthur Fellows, ACM Fellows, IEEE Fellows, AAAI Fellows, AAAS Fellows, and all manner of other accolades.
Our 50th anniversary celebration event will include the dedication for Gates Hall, with Bill Gates himself presiding. Plus we have assembled a day and a half program of talks by current and former faculty and students, along with plenty of time to socialize with old friends and make new ones. The program will feature sessions that highlight the department’s impact on computing education and research in social networks, distributed systems, programming languages, theory, graphics, and more.
To many of you, 50 might seem quite old---such is the demography of our field. But 50 is really quite young for a department at a University like Cornell, and it’s young enough for our earliest faculty to still be playing an active role. So, come home for a visit this Fall---to renew your connections with the past, see for yourself how far we’ve come, and hear where we are heading.
Fred B. Schneider ‘75
CS Department Chair, and Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science
Learn more about the celebration at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/events/50years