Program Description
The Field of Computer Science is intended for students who are primarily interested in the general aspects of computational processes, both theoretical and practical. Areas of research in the field include algorithms, architecture, artificial intelligence, computer vision, computational biology, concurrency and distributed computing, database systems, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, networks, numerical analysis, programming environments, programming languages and methodology, robotics, software engineering, and theory of computation. You can find out more about our research here.
Graduate Minor Requirements
For the Graduate Minor in Computer Science, students must have a Computer Science (CS) field member on his/her special committee. This minor requires a certain amount of knowledge in CS (which may or may not be acquired at Cornell). This requirement is best conveyed in terms of the following two groups of CS courses:
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All 5000-level courses except Practicums (e.g., 5121, 5321, 5411, 5439, 5621)
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All 6000 and 7000-level courses and graduate seminars (only if letter grade is available)
Typical requirements for Ph.D. students in other fields
The student must have knowledge of at least four courses from either (A) or (B), of which at least two must be from (B). In addition, at least two of these courses must form a natural sequence. It is up to the student's CS special committee member to determine whether two particular courses constitute a reasonable sequence. Examples of possible course sequences are listed below (this list is NOT intended to be inclusive). 5110-5120, 5110-6110, 5110-6120, 5120-6110, 5120-6120, 5410-6410, 5210-6220, 5700-4860, 5700-6700, 5810-6810, 5820-6820, 6110-6120, 6210-6220, 6810-6820.
Typical requirements for Masters students in other fields
The student must have knowledge of at least two courses from (B), or at least two from (A) and one from (B). In the latter case, 3410 counts as a group (A) course.
Grade requirements
Courses taken at Cornell must be for letter grade and be passed with a grade of B- or better to count toward the minor.
Modifications
The student and the CS special committee member must agree on a plan of study that fulfills the requirement for the CS minor (this should be done when the CS member joins the student's committee). The CS special committee member may modify the above requirements.
