In case you didn't know, Purdue's CS department is the oldest in the country, formally authorized in October 1962. Dr. Sam Conte was the first department head, serving until July 1979, when Dr. Peter Denning took over. Dr. Denning took a position with NASA in June, 1983 at which point Dr. John Rice became department head. After 13 years of distinguished service, Dr. Rice stepped down and returned to teaching. He was succeeded by Dr. Ahmed Sameh who came aboard during the 1996-1997 academic school year. Dr. Susanne Hambrusch, was appointed in the year 2002 and held the position until the summer of 2007. At that point in time Aditya Mathur took over as department head.

We are also one of the largest and most highly-rated departments in the country. This year the department has about 150 graduate students, about 45 faculty, and more than 600 undergraduate majors.

The CS department was originally located in the Math building. In 1985, the CS department moved into a building all to itself. This building was formerly the Memorial Gymnasium. (The Memorial is to a group of Purdue students and alumni who died in a train wreck while traveling to a game). It has been completely renovated to hold us. During the renovation it was rumored that a swimming pool would be left in the basement, but this idea was apparently dropped. Finally, in the fall of 2006, the department moved into our new location, the Lawson Computer Science Building.

On March 28, 2003, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Purdue Computer Science Department. It was a wonderful event, from recounting the early history of computing and the Computer Science Department, to recollections of people and the good times we had, to a look into what the future holds. For more details and interesting facts please refer to http://www2.cs.purdue.edu/40th/default.htm.

Part of the reason that the department is highly-regarded is that the faculty are active in research, publication, and service to the CS community. It would take pages to describe all the current research projects. Therefore, for reference, the department Annual Reports (which can be found online at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/AnnualReports/) contain a summary of current projects.

There is a research project for anyone here. There are research centers and institutes specializing in particular topics, a complete list of which is given at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/centers/. A brief decription of the centers is given as follows: The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) is currently viewed as one of the world's leading centers for research and education in areas of information security that are crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure. CERIAS is unique among such national centers in its multidisciplinary approach to the problems, ranging from purely technical issues (e.g., intrusion detection, network security, etc) to ethical, legal, educational, communicational, linguistic, and economic issues, and the subtle interactions and dependencies among them. CERIAS evolved from the COAST (Computer Operations, Audit, and Security Technologies) lab in 1999, which was a multiple project computer security research laboratory in Purdue's computer science department. For more information please refer to http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/. Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) is part of the National Science Foundation's Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program. SERC is devoted to software technology, more specifically, investigating the development and assessment of tools and methods for improving productivity and software quality throughout the life cycle. The SERC research program has been structured to improve the management of the software engineering process, the productivity of software engineers, and the quality of software engineering products. SERC began operation in October, 1986. For more information please refer to http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/serc.html The Indiana Center for Database Systems (ICDS) takes an interdisciplinary approach to solving practical problems in a wide variety of database systems and their applications. Research activities and projects in the center include multimedia databases, data mining, data streaming and sensors, database security and privacy, knowledge bases and web services. The research is applied to areas in digital government, life sciences, healthcare, and defense. A characteristic of the research in the center is that it is practical research, system oriented and high quality. Resources in the center include powerful computing and storage servers. The center infrastructure was enhanced through many grants from several agencies to build a database research infrastructure. For more information please refer to http://www.cs.purdue.edu/icds/.

A complete list of all projects and their areas is given at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/graduate_program/projects.htm. Some of them are as follows:

The SoftLab project focuses on the creation of environments, tools and infrastructure needed for building virtual laboratories for Computational Science and Engineering.

The Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab located in CS 151 and CS 115 specializes in 3d reconstructions from 2d images, model camera, simulation of September 11 attacks, distance learning and related work

The goal of the Network Algorithms and Analysis Laboratory (NAAL) at Purdue is to identify and solve key modeling and algorithmic problems arising in real-world networks including ad hoc networks (especially sensor and P2P networks), the Internet and WWW, biological networks, and social networks.

Current research projects include random graph-theoretic approach for protein structure determination, random geometric graph models and algorithms with applications to sensor networks, local distributed algorithms for resource-constrained networks, and models and algorithms for problems arising in Internet and WWW. For more information please refer to http://www.cs.purdue.edu/naal/.

You can find detailed information about research going on in the department at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research.html.