Welcome to the Computer Science Department
at the University of California, Santa Barbara!

Why Computer Science?

Computer Science is an exciting, challenging, and growing field that impacts the world and everyday life in countless ways.

Computer scientists are involved in creating technology and systems that are used in a wide range of industries, including medicine, communications, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and science. CS research pushes the state-of-the-art in computing theory and practice, and it leads to new technologies that change the world.

Despite all the impressive achievements of the field, we are convinced that there are many more exciting discoveries and applications of computer science yet to come, and you can be part of this process of exploration, discovery, and invention!

 


 

Chair's Message

Distinguished Professor Divyakant Agrawal

Divyakant Agrawal

Welcome to the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara!

CS@UCSB is a special place where exciting research meets exceptional teaching against the backdrop of wonderful natural beauty. As faculty, students, and staff of CS@UCSB, we feel lucky to be part of an outstanding department in the most impactful academic discipline of our times while living in one of the most beautiful places in the world! 

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Our Mission

The CS department at UC Santa Barbara is widely recognized as one of the top Computer Science departments in the nation, featuring a highly distinguished faculty and excellent students.

Our culture of education and research strongly encourages collaborative, entrepreneurial, supportive, multidisciplinary solutions-driven efforts at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our students and graduates shape the future of science and engineering here and around the world. We are committed to providing a respectful and inclusive environment for all members of our community, free from all forms of discrimination and harassment.

The Computer Science Department seeks to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for productive careers in industry, academia, and government, by providing an outstanding environment for teaching and research in the core and emerging areas of the discipline. We bring computational approaches and solutions to some of society’s most vital and complex issues. We are presently engaged in research that promises game-changing breakthroughs in computing and will bring about advances in important areas such as healthcare, communications, education, government, energy efficiency, and the environment. We believe that we will help transform the future; that computing is central to shaping and improving the world by enabling data-driven scientific discoveries and bringing a world of rich, easily-accessible information to individuals everywhere.

The department has been on an impressive upward trajectory for many years, fueled by the quality and impact of our work, the recognition of our faculty, and the success of our graduates. 


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Announcements

Announcements

Congratulations to UCSB’s Lei Li and Yu-Xiang Wang on their recent promotions from assistant professors to associate professors.

 

UCSB’s William Wang recently received a promotion from associate professor to professor in the Department of Computer Science. Professor Wang is the director of UCSB’s Natural Language Processing group and the founding director of UCSB's Center for Responsible Machine Learning.

 

The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce that Maryam Majedi is joining UCSB as an assistant teaching professor.

 

UCSB Computer Science, led by CS Professor Rich Wolski, joins an NSF funded Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) grant, to develop scalable data collaboration tools for multi-messenger astronomy.

Congratulations to our Alumni Awardees, who were honored for their accomplishments at the 2023 Award Ceremony. 

On June 16th, 2023, we celebrated our graduate awardees at the CS Award Ceremony. Congratulations!

News Archive

News Spotlight

The National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health sent a video crew to Santa Barbara recently to highlight the work Michael Beyeler, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Computer Science Department. The result is a fascinating preview of a transformative technology that could one day have a big impact.

“There’s up to six million people worldwide who live with profound blindness,” Beyeler explains in the newly released video, “and the idea of a visual prosthesis is to replace lost functionality with an implant. Even though these devices are already out there, the vision they provide is rather limited.”

Professor William Wang has been selected for the 2023 IEEE Signal Processing Society’s 2023 Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, which honors individuals who have made significant technical contributions within their field early in their career. The award recognizes Professor Wang for “contributions to the development of scalable algorithms in natural language processing.”

UC Santa Barbara Computer Science is set to make a strong showing at this year’s Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) annual meeting, with 20 papers accepted at the prestigious conference. With contributions from professors William Wang, Yu-Xiang WangShiyu Chang, and Michael Beyeler on topics as wide-ranging as text-to-image evaluation, privacy, and predictive models of visual cortex neural activity, UCSB’s efforts mirror the broad scope of the conference itself.

Congratulations to Misha Sra, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, for being one of nine UCSB faculty recipients of the 2023-24 Hellman Fellowship. The award is designed to support early- to mid-career faculty who have shown a capacity for great distinction in their work. Also honored this year is affiliated faculty member Nina Miolane of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.

Congratulations to UCSB’s Logic Wardens team for taking second place in the CSAW’23 Logic Locking Competition at NYU!

UCSB Natural Language Processing postdoc Liangming Pan has won the Area Chair’s Award at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asian Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.