2010 NRC Ranking recognizes faculty and doctoral student research excellence
Louisiana State University's Computer Science PhD program has been placed in the top 30 programs in the United States by the The National Research Council (NRC) in their recently released rankings. Subject matter experts ranked 126 computer science departments based on twenty characteristics, including research activity, student involvement and diversity. These raw scores were aggregated via two different models to provide a regression-based R-ranking and a survey-based S-ranking. Innovatively, the NRC has not assigned serial ranks this year. Instead, they have given each university a probabilistic rank, reported as 5 percentile and 95 percentile ranges, rather than one fixed number.
LSU's computer science department has ranked remarkably well across all of NRC's criteria. Our R-rank range is 19-39, which means that out of all different rankings generated, 5% of rankings placed LSU-CS in the top 19 and 95% of them placed LSU-CS in the top 39 programs in the USA. Similarly, our S-rank range was 13-49. While this does not directly give us a conventional rank, if we sort all the departments on any of the aggregating criteria, LSU computer science ranks in the top 30 of 126 programs in the United States.
This reflects significant progress from our last NRC ranking of 76. We are now in the company of universities such as Purdue and UMass, who are well recognized for the quality of their teaching and their research.
This accomplishment highlights the dramatically increased quality of the department's faculty as well as doctoral students. "LSU's flagship agenda has catalyzed research activity and teaching excellence in the computer science department by allowing us to strategically hire promising new faculty and attract doctoral students of higher caliber," said Prof. Iyengar, head of the computer science department at LSU. Computer science faculty have received increasingly higher grant funding from the NSF, department of defense, AFOSR and DARPA, and have award winning papers to their credit. This excellence is a matter of pride for Louisiana State University, whose undergraduate students also benefit from the increased rigor and breadth of academic and research activities in the department.
