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
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!
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.
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 Spotlight
As society increases the use of technology to manage daily life, so does the need for professionals to help advance technological progress. Luckily, new findings from Glassdoor identified that the top jobs are in computing technology.
Undergraduate and graduate students in UC Santa Barbara’s Computer Science Department have received numerous prestigious accolades from top academic conferences and organizations in the past few months, ranging from best-paper awards to highly competitive fellowships. Department leaders see the national recognitions bestowed on their students as confirmation of the interdisciplinary, supportive, and solutions-driven efforts of the faculty and staff in computer science, the College of Engineering, and the university.
Congratulations to fourth-year Ph.D. candidate Yuke Wang, selected as one of the 10 recipients (globally) of the prestigious NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship 2022-2023. NVIDIA is the inventor of the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and the world's leading company in computer graphics, scientific computing, and artificial intelligence. Yuke Wang works with Professor Yufei Ding at the CS department of UCSB.
Congratulations to third-year Ph.D. student Sanjay Chandrasekaran, selected as one of the three recipients (globally) of the prestigious M-Lab Research Fellowship. M-Lab is an open Internet measurement lab led by Google Inc. and Code for Society and Sciences teams. Sanjay works with Professor Arpit Gupta at Systems and Networking Lab, UCSB.
The NLP Group researchers Aesha Parekh was named the 2022 CRA’s Outstanding Researchers Award Finalist (Top-10 Nationally) and Samhita Honnavalli was named Honorable Mention.
First-year Ph.D. student Gyuwan Kim was awarded Best Paper in November 2021 for his paper titled, "Length-Adaptive Transformer: Train Once with Length Drop, Use Anytime with Search" at SustaiNLP 2021 Workshop at EMNLP 2021, along with his co-author Kyunghyun Cho, Associate Professor for Computer Science and Data Science at New York University.