Soundbyte Newsletter Spring|Summer 2008
Soundbyte is the biannual newsletter produced by the CSE department. Please e-mail suggested news items for the next Soundbyte and any questions or comments to .
About the Department
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) offers a broad undergraduate and graduate curriculum, based on the application and theoretical foundations of computer science. CSE students gain breadth and depth of knowledge in a multitude of specialties, including: software engineering, data mining, bioinformatics, human computer interaction, graphics, architecture, numerical analysis, and artificial intelligence. Students are instructed by internationally renowned faculty and well prepared for industry positions, competitive graduate programs, and academic positions.
In addition to academic work, the CSE department also has one of the nation’s top computer science research programs (for a full listing of specialties visit Research Areas). Supported through government and industry funding, faculty and graduate student research helps define and expand the current and future use of technology.
The CSE department consists of 40 tenure-track faculty, 13 staff members, 550 undergraduate students, and 370 graduate students. Each year the University awards approximately 150 bachelor’s, 100 master’s, and 20 doctoral degrees to CSE students.
For more information about the department, please see our About Us page which includes a special section entitled CSE Excellence: By the numbers.
What's New
CSE to host Bay Area Alumni Event, Aug. 13
The CSE department and alumnus Jeff Dean (B.S. 1990) will host a Bay Area CSE alumni event in Mountain View, California on Aug. 13, 2008 at the Computer History Museum. Dean, a Google Fellow, will be the event’s featured speaker. Institute of Technology Dean Steven Crouch will also be in attendance.
Dean is the 2007 recipient of the CSE Distinguished Alumni Award. He works at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Dean’s contributions at Google range from low level libraries to high level components and services, all used extensively by various groups and products at Google as building blocks. Dean has helped design and implement five generations of the software to handle searches entered on Google.com, and played important roles in several of Google’s advertising products. Dean has also worked on key pieces of distributed systems infrastructure, including MapReduce and BigTable.
For more information about this event, please contact Anastacia Quinn Davis at aqdavis@umn.edu.
Wall Street Journal story features CSE expert on personalization technology
A story in the Wall Street Journal featured CSE professor John Riedl as an expert in personalization technology, focusing in on his evaluation of the use of recommender systems used by Web sites such as Netflix and Amazon.
In the story, the benefits and perils of personalized computer recommender technology are debated. Riedl emphasized the need for people to rely on both computer recommendations and human wisdom to make judgments about things like what books to read or what movies to see. For more information about this, visit the story ‘Technology Gets Personal.’
For Current Students
Science Watch Ranking
Science Watch, a publication tracking research trends and performance, ranked the U of M CSE department 9th for the citation impact of published research papers among the top 100 federally funded universities. The department’s papers were measured between 2001 and 2005.
40 Years of Excellence
Download a pdf version of CSE’s 40 Years of Excellence
