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
CS Talk: Friday, January 10, 2025, at 10 am in HFH 1132.
Title: Making Space for Students and Their Needs (on a Budget)
Abstract: As classes get larger, giving equitable individual attention to every student becomes nearly impossible without systems and policies that are carefully developed over time to maintain these relationships. One part of the equation that is often overlooked is the physical spaces that this attention occurs in.
In this talk, we describe our recent work developing a physical “computer science collaboration space” at Caltech. Our space serves as a nexus for undergraduate office hours, active learning classes, hybrid staff meetings and classes, and a place for undergraduates to meet up, socialize, and do collaborative work. In addition to a physical space renovation, we instrumented the space with important amenities, software, and hardware carefully chosen to encourage positive help-seeking behavior, office hours throughput, student satisfaction and learning, and feelings of safety and inclusion in all events held in the room. And we did it on a budget.
Two junior faculty in the Computer Science Department, Lingqi Yan and Trinabh Gupta, have been promoted from the position of assistant professor to that of associate professor.
Yan, who earned his PhD at UC Berkeley, works in the area of computer graphics, and his research is aimed mainly at building theoretical foundations used to render ultra-realistic images reflecting real-world complexity. He has led the way in exploiting machine-learning approaches for such physically based rendering.
He says that, as a computer graphics researcher, his dream is to “present people with an interactive computer-generated world to live in, just as is done in such movies as The Matrix and Ready Player One.”
Gupta, who received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin, came to UCSB in fall 2018, bringing industry experience gained during a year spent as a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems Security and Privacy research group at Microsoft Research.
Pursuing research in the area of computer systems, Gupta says that he especially enjoys taking theoretical constructs from the literature on cryptography (e.g., private information retrieval and homomorphic encryption) and applying them to build systems that provide strong security and user privacy.
Congratulations to the Computer Science Department's alumni awardees, honored at the 2024 Awards Ceremony.
News Spotlight
In December, UCSB chancellor Henry Yang announced the appointment of UCSB computer science professor Timothy Sherwood as the new dean of the College of Creative Studies (CCS), saying, “In his more than two decades at UC Santa Barbara, Professor Sherwood has established an outstanding record of service to our campus community.”
Congratulations to Professor Christopher Kruegel for being named a 2025 IEEE Fellow for contributions to security, malware detection, and vulnerability analysis. The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and is reserved for a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The accomplishments that are being honored have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science, and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society at large.
Thanks to all the UCSB Computer Science alumni who joined us this weekend at our first 2024 Computer Science Alumni event in Palo Alto, CA. We enjoyed sharing with you the latest news from the department and learning about your many successes in the field. We look forward to many more of these events in the future!