This fall, the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University was
proud to celebrate its 25th anniversary under the banner "Academic
Excellence, Innovative Research" with a sequence of events, from special
invited lectures throughout the year, to a dinner with Peter Likins,
current President of the University of Arizona and, as former provost,
one of the principal individuals that made the Department happen, even
in times when computer science was not yet universally recognized as its
own discipline.  The event was highlighted by a one-day symposium by
current new faculty and alumni, with a keynote address by Bob Kahn and a
retrospective from the first department chair, Joe Traub (see pg.  X). 
The article on pg.  X provides more details and links to photos and
video recordings. 

The Department has now 34 faculty, complemented by an increasing number
of adjunct professors from local research laboratories teaching advanced
graduate courses.  Unlike most other departments, our PhD, MS and
undergraduate student populations are of the same magnitude, with 124
PhD students, about 160 Masters students, and 145 undergraduate majors.
The Department's research and teaching is supported by 16 administrative
staff and 5 system administrators. Last year, we conducted research
supported by almost $10 million of external funding.

Since 1979, we have graduated more than 150 PhDs, now working in most of
the major computer-science-related laboratories and in many
universities, both in the United States and beyond.  1620 undergraduates
have received a Columbia CS degree over the years, along with 1206 MS
students.  We want to continue to leverage our broad and deep coverage
to provide more than just a textbook education to our students.  For
example, our low student-to-faculty ratio allows us to offer
individually supervised research projects, with almost all MS students
and many of the undergraduates taking part in at least one such project
during their time at Columbia.

Despite the vastly wider scope and reach of computer science as a whole,
the Department's faculty and students have continued to work together,
in research groups, long-term collaborations and shorter-term research
projects.

As computer science and its products become an integral part of most
human activities, we have now completed our "renovation" of our academic
house.  Prof.  Al Aho's describes (pg.  X) how we see the future of
undergraduate education and how we can best educate students to succeed
characterized by a need to have marketable skills and practice-based
insight, but also maintain the core foundations that will serve the
student throughout his or her technical career.  We had earlier revised
our Master's program to focus on advanced topics and allow
specialization in tracks including foundations of computer science,
computer security, machine learning, natural language processing,
network systems and software systems.

Last fall, we were delighted to be able to add two new faculty to two
core research areas in the Department, computer engineering as well as
computer vision and graphics.  Prof.  Luca Carloni joined us after
graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, with research
interests in the fields of design technologies for electronic systems
(with emphasis on component reusability, communication protocols,
synchronization mechanisms, and low-energy architectures), design
methodologies for the deployment of embedded software on heterogeneous
and distributed platforms, computer architecture, integrated circuits,
and combinatorial optimization.  Prof.  Eitan Grinspun was previously a
postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute, New York University, after
graduating from Caltech.  He strives to develop fundamental
computational models for physical simulation, computer animation, and
geometric modeling.

You can keep abreast with Columbia Computer Science news as it happens,
by subscribing to our mailing list at
http://lists.cs.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/cucs-news. We are also
experimenting with a departmental blog to provide links and comments on
topics of general interest in computer science (http://columbiacs.blogspot.com/).
Alumni can find our new portal at http://alum.cs.columbia.edu/, where
they can look up fellow alumni, see job listings received by the
Department and share their current whereabouts and activities. We always
look forward to hearing from our former students, faculty and staff and plan
to provide more opportunities to meet others, as well as other services. 
Please get in touch with me if you have ideas for alumni-related services
and events.

Regards, and best wishes for 2005,

Henning Schulzrinne
Professor and Chair