Computer Science

Administration

  • Stan Sclaroff Chair
  • Leonid Reyzin Associate Chair
  • John Byers Director of Graduate Studies
  • George Kollios Director of Graduate Admissions

The Graduate Programs

The graduate programs in computer science prepare students for careers at the forefront of computing research, teaching, and industrial progress. Computer science has become a highly active and fast-changing discipline and students at Boston University have the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of this fundamental and exciting field. The computer science faculty is composed of leading researchers in many central areas of computer science. All are involved in graduate education. Areas of current faculty interests are theory of computation, information theory, complexity theory, analysis of algorithms, cryptography, security, programming language theory, image and video computing, data mining, operating systems, real-time computing, parallel and distributed computing, large-scale networked information systems, distributed systems, networking, database systems, and performance evaluation.

The department awards both MA and PhD degrees. Graduate students work closely with computer science faculty on research and applied projects, and have the opportunity to interact with distinguished faculty in the Mathematics Department, the Center for Computational Science, the Bioinformatics Program, and the College of Engineering. The master’s program consists of eight courses, five of which are in core breadth areas, and a master’s project. The doctoral program requires eight courses beyond the master’s degree, the passing of written and oral qualifying examinations, and a thesis exhibiting strong original research.