Ph.D. required courses Keith Marzullo University of California, San Diego Computer Science and Engineering

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit2 Overview Why did we establish these requirements? What undergraduate courses do we expect? What core classes do we require? How do we ensure depth? How do we ensure breadth?

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit3 History We revised our Ph.D. requirements in 2001 Tension of what all Ph.D. students should know when field is broadening Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Bioengineering Recent growth (2x in faculty over last seven years) into vision, graphics, machine learning, networked systems,... Recognize students coming in with diverse backgrounds Decrease time before starting research Difficulty of triage

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit4 Undergraduate courses Either must have, or can take at UCSD, or can simply take the final and get a passing grade: Theory of Computation Algorithms Architecture Operating Systems Programming languages or compilers... some discussion about statistics

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit5 Core Graduate Courses Algorithms Operating Systems Architecture One of: Complexity (for CS) Computing Circuitry (for CE) Faculty Research Seminar

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit6 CSE Graduate OS Read two papers for each class Historically important Hard-to-understand pivotal Currently important... all loosely structured around operating systems Taught solely through Q/A Extensive benchmarking project

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit7 Depth requirement Three courses from specialty area Theoretical Computer Science Programming Languages, Compilers, and Software Engineering Computer Systems Database Systems Computer Engineering Artificial Intelligence Graphics and Vision Bioinformatics

22 May 2006 U.S. - China Computer Science Leadership Summit8 Breadth Requirement Each student takes three non-seminar courses from at least two other specialty areas.