About

Welcome to the website of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Our Department was established in 1966, making us one of the ten oldest CS Departments in the US. Our first Department Chair was Dr. Orrin E. Taulbee.

The Department has been a part of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences until June 2017. In July 2017, we joined forces with the School of Information Sciences to form the new School of Computing and Information (SCI). In addition to the Department of Computer Science, SCI has two more departments (Department of Informatics and Networked Systems and Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship) and two programs (Computational Modeling & Simulation PhD Program and Intelligent Systems Program).

Degrees

We offer undergraduate degrees in Computer Science (BS and a minor) and Computational Biology (BS), graduate degrees in Computer Science (BS+MS, MS, and Ph.D.). We are also participating in the upcoming undergraduate degree in Data Science (BS), joint with the Math and Stats Departments.

Rankings

We are consistently ranked among the top Computer Science Departments in the US:

• #55 for graduate degrees (out of 202 programs, i.e., top 27%), ranked in 2022,
• #54 for undergraduate degrees (out of 537 programs, i.e., top 10%), ranked in 2022,
• #54 in May 2022 CSRankings.org overall (out of 187 universities, i.e., top 29%), which considers research productivity,
  • #24 in CSRankings.org for Artificial Intelligence (out of 175 universities, i.e., top 14%), and
  • #56 in CSRankings.org for Systems (out of 175 universities, i.e., top 32%).

The University of Pittsburgh is ranked among top universities across the country: 

• #59 for national universities, ranked in 2022,
• #15 in research and development expenditures, based off of 2020 data, and
• #21 in technology transfer, ranked in 2022.
• Other University of Pittsburgh rankings.

Faculty

We currently have 21 tenured/tenure-stream faculty (with various research interests) and nine (9) appointment-stream faculty. In the last three years, we hired: 

• Eight (8) tenure-track faculty (Malihe Alikhani, Amy Baby, Jacob Biehl, Xiaowei Jia, Stephen Lee, Longfei Shangguan, Xulong Tang, and Erin Walker) and 
• Four (4) appointment-stream faculty (Wonsun Ahn, Arjun Chandrasekhar, Tim Hoffman, and Luis Oliveira).

In addition to our full-time faculty, we often rely on part-time instructors to teach courses in their areas of expertise.

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