School of Computing Graduate Handbook

University of Utah
School of Computing
50 S Central Campus Dr RM 3190
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9205

(801) 581-8224 (voice)
(801) 581-5843 (fax)
info@cs.utah.edu
http://www.cs.utah.edu

2002-2003

In 1965, the Department of Computer Science was founded. Its name was changed to the School of Computing on July 1, 2000, to reflect the broadening of academic pursuits already underway within the faculty, and to encourage the creation of multi-disciplinary programs with other university departments. The degree programs remain as degrees in Computer Science.

The School of Computing offers highly-regarded programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. School faculty and students have done pioneering work in interactive graphics, stack machine and dataflow architectures, digital recording, graphical user interfaces, three-dimensional rendering, asynchronous circuits, video games, computer algebra, and computer animation. Faculty and alumni have also founded a number of well-known companies, including Adobe Systems, Ashlar, Atari, Cirrus Logic, Evans & Sutherland, Myricom, Netscape, Pixar, Pixel-Planes, Silicon Graphics, and WordPerfect.

Graduate students immerse themselves in the research activities of the School, which can be approximately grouped into 7 broad areas. Many individual research groups do work spanning multiple areas.

1. Graphics and visualization: modeling, CAD/CAM, rendering, and scientific visualization.

2. Systems and programming languages: operating systems, parallel distributed systems, programming languages, compilers, security, networks, software engineering.

3. Immersive environments: novel systems for building immersive environments allowing manipulation of virtual objects and locomotion through virtual worlds.

4. Architecture, VLSI, and verification methods: Innovative memory and communication architectures, asynchronous circuits and systems, formal verification of computing systems.

5. Scientific computation: methods for solving and visualizing large-scale scientifc problems.

6. Artificial intelligence: natural language processing, robotics, and computer vision.

7. Educational software environments: applications of computing, communications, and connectivity to education.

These research activities are funded from a variety of federal, state, and industrial sources, including: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Energy, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institutes of Health; the Utah State Centers of Excellence Program; and Adobe, Cisco, Evans and Sutherland, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Nortel, Novell, and Silicon Graphics. Among the highlights:

• The School is a partner in an NSF Science and Technology Center for Computer Graphics and Visualization along with Brown, Caltech, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina.

• An NSF Research Infrastructure award supports research activities requiring high-bandwidth, low-latency machine-to-machine communications.

• It is a partner in the DOE Advanced Visualization Technology Center along with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.

• It is a key participant in the University's $20 million Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative grant from the Department of Energy.

• It has an NIH Center for Bioelectric Field Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization.

Reflecting the broadened mandate that went into the creation of the School of Computing, the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute was recently formed within the School. Also, the School recently received the John E. and Marva M. Warnock Presidential Endowed Chair for Faculty Innovation, to support scholarship and creativity in the early career of an outstanding young faculty member. John Warnock is co-founder and president of Adobe.

Graduate students have access to hundreds of Unix and Windows NT workstations and to the more specialized equipment that resides in the various research laboratories. This equipment includes a 96 CPU SGI Origin 2000 with 8 Infinite Reality Engines; a 200-node network testbed and emulation facility; SGI ONYX2, Power Challenge, Power Onyx, and Origin 200 computers; robot arms, mobile robots, and image digitization and display systems; a variety of visual, haptic, and locomotory virtual environment interfaces; a professional-quality video editing and teleconferencing facility; advanced graphics display workstations equipped with special-purpose graphics hardware; and a collection of numerically controlled equipment used to produce physical prototypes of computer-generated designs. The University of Utah is committed to policies of equal opportunity, affirmative action, and nondiscrimination. The University seeks to provide equal access to its programs, services, and activities for people with disabilities. Reasonable prior notice is needed to arrange accommodations.