Luke Auburn
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Director of Communications, Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences When Rick Rashid ’80 (PhD) became the first student in the University of Rochester’s new Department of Computer Science to set foot on campus, he was taking a leap of faith.
It was 1974. He had just turned down an opportunity to pursue a PhD in math at the University of California, Berkeley, and he arrived before any faculty members or fellow students did. The only person there was administrative assistant Jill Orioli, and it would be months before the department’s first computers arrived.
Computer science was a young field. It had only been a few years since the first academic departments in the country had begun branching off from the fields of mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering. Rashid, a mathematics and comparative literature graduate from Stanford University, enjoyed working with computers but knew he was taking a gamble in a new discipline and on a department made from whole cloth.
“The hard part was telling my parents because they had this idea of what I was going to be doing and I had changed my mind,” says Rashid. “They were super supportive on the call even though they didn’t really know anything about computers and neither had a college education. Years later my father confessed ‘we thought it was the stupidest idea you’d ever had in your life.’ ”
As it turned out, Rashid and the field of computer science had bright futures. After completing his doctorate, Rashid joined the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Then, in 1991, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates hired him as the founding director of a new division at the company: Microsoft Research.
Mirroring his rise was the growth of Rochester’s department. “We quickly went from being probably the computer science department with the fewest facilities you could imagine, to one of the most technically advanced computer science departments in the country,” says Rashid.
In the fall of 1974, Rashid, seven additional students, and the first faculty members, Jim Low and Paul Rovner, coalesced around charismatic founding department chair Jerome (Jerry) Feldman ’60. Feldman, who had earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Rochester, returned to the campus after having served as the associate director of the artificial intelligence lab at Stanford University.
He quickly used his contacts in government and industry to build the program into a serious player. Through connections at Xerox PARC, by the end of the year he was able to secure four Alto computers—the first computers to incorporate features like a mouse and Ethernet networking—before anyone outside of Xerox had them. And through his contacts at the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, he connected the University to ARPANET, the precursor of the internet, introduced just a few years before.
By the mid-80s, the commercialization of personal computers was spreading access to computing and interest in computer science. The department was making an outsized impact.
Feldman, Rashid, technical operations manager Liudy Bukys, and others created an operating system that could manage multiple machines at once. Called the Rochester Intelligent Gateway, or RIG, it’s known as “the great-grandparent” of the operating system used by Apple computers.
Early faculty members Chris Brown and Dana Ballard published Computer Vision, the seminal text in the field, and James Allen published Natural Language Understanding, a similarly influential text.
Large grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation were rolling in. In particular, NSF support enabled the department in 1984 to acquire a 128-node BBN Butterfly machine, then the largest shared-memory multiprocessor in the world.
At that point the distinguishing characteristics of the department that still define it to this day were clear: strength in artificial intelligence (AI), systems, and theory; an interdisciplinary focus; and an intimate size.
A member of Rochester’s Department of Computer Science faculty since 1984, Michael Scott has a long perspective on the evolution of computer science and on the unique aspects of Rochester’s computer science curriculum. Scott, the Arthur Gould Yates Professor of Engineering and professor of computer science, addresses both topics in this conversation, part of the Full Spectrum video series of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
The focus on AI created opportunities for collaborations with faculty in cognitive science (later the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences), the Center for Visual Science, the Design Automation Project, and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
Says Michael Scott, a professor of computer science and the Arthur Gould Yates Professor of Engineering, who came to Rochester in 1984, “Computer science is an interdisciplinary field, but I think it’s more the case here than almost anywhere.”
By the 1990s, the promises of ARPANET had borne fruit, and the technology evolved into the internet, connecting millions of computers around the world. Meanwhile, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee had proposed an application for the internet: a method to create pages, with unique addresses, giving networks a new and compelling purpose. The World Wide Web, as it was soon known, spread information with ease and at a speed (even in its first days) previously unknown. The dot-com era had arrived, and with it, exploding interest in the study of computer science.
The department had solely been offering graduate degrees, but nationwide, the demand for computer science was high enough that the department introduced undergraduate degrees and a minor in 1995.
The undergraduate program was a significant development for the department, and leadership had to be careful to integrate undergraduate education while preserving the culture that had allowed the department to thrive.
“When I arrived in 1989, the culture was 100 percent focused on research and doing something amazing,” says George Ferguson ’95 (PhD), director of the department’s undergraduate program and a professor of instruction.
That same spirit infuses the undergraduate program, which has a heavy research focus and emphasis on “breadth and the foundation of the discipline as a whole,” he adds. That approach fosters “graduates who understand enough to learn new things, which is essential in a field that has been evolving constantly since its inception.”
At the same time, the department has been deft in attracting students with wide interests. “The program was smartly designed from the beginning so that you could either pursue a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science,” Ferguson adds. The modified requirements of the bachelor of arts made a computer science degree more accessible to students also pursuing degrees in fields from physics to art history.
The program’s first graduating class in 1996 included 10 students, and by 2003, that number had increased fivefold.
The dot-com bubble burst of 2000 put a pause on the undergraduate program’s growth. As tech companies folded, some prospective students became wary of pursuing careers in computer science.
Christopher Stewart ’08, now a professor of computer science at Ohio State University, says that when he arrived as a PhD student in 2003, the discipline was facing intense challenges beyond the financial sector as well.
For the past few decades, the computer industry had relied on the expectation, largely borne out by experience, that the number of transistors on a microchip would double about every two years, at nominal cost. Accordingly, computers would continue to get smaller, faster, and cheaper. The trend became known as Moore’s Law and, not really a law at all, scientists began predicting its end. Similarly, Dennard scaling—the physical principle that enabled transistors growing in potency to consume less power—was running out as well.
Moore’s law and Dennard scaling, says Stewart, “were these things that allowed us to keep building sequential programs for so long. It was an exciting time, and it was fun to be a part of that phase of computing.”
Stewart, who focused on computing systems, says much of the research at the time focused on parallel computing—that is, how to break down large, complex problems into smaller, independent groups of calculations, all of which could be carried out simultaneously across multiple processors relying on shared memory. Although at first Stewart did not understand what parallelism would lead to, he received an answer that proved to be decades ahead of its time.
As a beginning graduate student, “I was really trying to understand the field and where things were headed,” he recalls. He asked Michael Scott, the leader of the computer systems research group, what was likely to happen to the field of parallel computing.
“I asked [him], ‘What are we going to do? Even if we do get all of this parallel programming done, we already know how to write’ whatever single-coded thread was dominant that day. He told me, ‘Chris, if we can do parallelism right, we can reach new heights with AI.’ That was at least two generations of insight ahead of where computing would go.”
By the mid 2010s, computer science had rebounded from the dot-com bust and experienced a second surge in enrollment. With that growth also came efforts to diversify the student body, particularly to get more women to pursue computer science degrees at Rochester.
Sandhya Dwarkadas joined the department as an assistant professor in 1996 and later became the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering and from 2014 to 2020, chair of computer science. Dwarkadas, now a professor and chair of computer science at the University of Virginia, recalls in those early years a tight-knit and collegial department but one that had few women.
“I taught many classes where I had just one woman or no women in the class…Now the statistics are roughly 30 percent. That is a pretty big sea change.”
It’s also well above the national average of 20 percent.
Under Dwarkadas’s leadership, Rochester became one of 15 universities in 2014 to join BRAID (Building, Recruiting, and Inclusion for Diversity), an initiative funded by Facebook, Google, Intel, and Microsoft and administered by the Anita Borg Institute.
“This cohort of 15 departments met regularly and exchanged information about what it would take to make a difference,” she says. She and undergraduate coordinator Marty Guenther worked to attract more students interested in double majors, and to build community and provide opportunities for peer networking. Those efforts “made a huge difference,” says Dwarkadas.
In 2013, the department spun off the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Outgoing chair Henry Kautz became its founding director, and together the programs moved into the new Wegmans Hall.
Now, as the use of commercial generative AI spreads rapidly, the department remains at the forefront of AI research. “Key roots of today’s AI explosion go back to work that was done here,” says Scott. “Our department has been about half AI since its founding. Today that emphasis is very common. But until even as recently as 10 years ago, it was uncommon.”
Earlier this year, one of the department’s first graduates presented the department with a sizeable birthday gift.
Daniel Sabbah ’74, ’82 (PhD) graduated with a degree in mathematics just before the launch of the computer science department. He stayed at Rochester for graduate study in the new department and, after earning a PhD, went on to IBM, where he helped create its cloud platform and pioneer its move into open source, and played a key role in its successful expansion into internet software.
Sabbah has made a $2 million commitment to establish the 50th Anniversary Distinguished Professorship in Computer Science.
“I am in a position where I can help facilitate opportunities for others, especially those who have or will build careers in computer science,” he says. “I’m honored to play a role in the development of the department and the people within it.”
The Department of Computer Science celebrates its 50th anniversary on Friday, September 27, during Meliora Weekend. All alumni, colleagues, and friends are invited to join. Visit or contribute to the department’s memory board.
The roots of computer science predate the existence of any programmable machine. But the formation of the academic field was heavily dependent on such technological achievement.
As with many feats of modern technology, significant progress began during World War II.
1936
British scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, presents the principles of the “Turing machine,” a model of digital computers. During World War II, electro-mechanical devices developed by Turing and his colleagues to break Nazi code supplied the Allies with crucial military intelligence.
1946
In a project of the US Army, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, a programmable electronic computer capable of performing complex calculations at unprecedented speed.
MASTER OF WAR: Despite its speed, the ENIAC had no memory, and each calculation was programmed manually. Programming teams often included women, such as Jean Bartik (left) and Frances Spence. (University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center)
1958–59
Two engineers, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, independently and simultaneously invent the integrated circuit, or “chip,” which becomes the foundation of memory and processing. Kilby is awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for the work.
1962
Purdue becomes the first American university to establish a department of computer science. In the next few years, a small number of other institutions follow, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Wisconsin, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford
1966–69
The federal defense research initiative Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, develops ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. ARPANET enabled multiple computers to connect to a single mainframe, aiding communication between machines.
INTERNET SANDBOX: By 1972, ARPANET was three years old and growing fast. The University of Rochester got connected shortly after the computer science department’s founding in 1974, through the US Air Force Rome (NY) Air Development Center, or RADC, shown in this map. (Wikimedia Commons)
1973
Xerox introduces the Alto computer. It incorporates such features as a mouse and a graphical interface, together with Ethernet networking capability, allowing several computers to connect. Introduced at $32,000, according to a 1981 article in Byte magazine, the Alto was intended for research and never commercialized or mass produced.
$32,000 PERSONAL COMPUTER: Accompanying the Alto’s sleek desktop setup was a processor box that fit in a small metal cabinet. (Wikimedia Commons)
1974
Rochester launches the Department of Computer Science. It begins the fall semester with three faculty members and eight graduate students.
Founding chair Jerome (Jerry) Feldman obtains four Alto computers from Xerox—making Rochester one of the first universities to own the machine. In the next few years, classmates Rick Rashid ’80 (PhD) and Gene Ball ’02 (PhD) create one of the earliest networked computer games for the Alto. Alto-Trek, inspired by the TV show Star Trek, featured a universe of 16 star systems and included Klingon, Romulan, and Terran spaceships and weaponry from the show.
FOUR FAB ALTOS: Founding chair Jerome (Jerry) Feldman poses with a couple of the four Xerox Alto computers he secured for the department. The machines were given the names John, Paul, George, and Ringo. (University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)
1975
Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft to make software for the Altair 8080, a personal computer released the same year.
1976
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne found Apple Computer with the aim of designing and selling user-friendly personal computers.
A team of faculty members and students create an operating system, the Rochester Intelligent Gateway, or RIG, that can manage multiple machines at once. A landmark in network architecture, RIG is widely acknowledged as the direct ancestor of the Apple operating system, through the intermediate Accent, Mach, and NeXTSTEP projects, led by Rick Rashid ’80 (PhD) and Avie Tevanian ’83, who became a doctoral student of Rashid’s at Carnegie Mellon.
1981
IBM introduces its first personal computer. The IBM PC, using Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system, goes on the market in August for $1,565. Purchased widely by businesses, the PC becomes the industry standard for office workers.
1982
Computer Vision, a textbook by faculty members Christopher Brown and Dana Ballard, is published by Prentice-Hall. The book becomes a landmark in AI as it pertains to how computers identify, process, and analyze real-world objects.
1984
Apple introduces the Macintosh computer.
The department, already strong in parallel computing, acquires a 128-node BBN Butterfly Parallel Processor, the largest shared-memory multiprocessor in the world at the time. Over the next few years, faculty including Thomas LeBlanc, Michael Scott, and Christopher Brown develop new software packages and applications, leading to innovations in parallel algorithms, memory management, synchronization, and operating system design that continue to shape the state of the art today.
1985
Construction begins on the seven-story Computer Studies Building. Completed in 1987, it will house computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and the Carlson Science and Engineering Library.
TOO BIG FOR ITS BUILDING: With more faculty, students, and equipment, the computer science department has outgrown its home in Hylan Hall. Construction of the Computer Studies Building is completed in 1987. (University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)
1986
Diane Litman (PhD) becomes the first woman to earn a degree from the Department of Computer Science. She went on to become principal technical staff member in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at AT&T Labs–Research and a professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh.
1989
British researcher Tim Berners-Lee publishes his proposal for hypertext markup language (html), which becomes the building block of the World Wide Web.
1991
Science News reports that a team of Rochester computer science graduate students “has developed a checker-playing robot that not only works out a strategy but also ‘sees’ the board, makes the moves, and even comments on the play.”
ADVENTURES IN ROBOTICS: Faculty and graduate students watch as the robotic arm later featured in Science News takes its first stab at checkers. (University Libraries/Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation)
1995
The department introduces an undergraduate major and graduates its first class, including 10 students, in 1996.
2009
The department, previously part of the School of Arts & Sciences, moves into the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
2013
The Goergen Institute for Data Science is established. Plans begin for a new home, Wegmans Hall, to house the institute and the computer science department in a collaborative environment. The building is completed in 2017.
ARC OF PROGRESS: In a nod to the past, the design of Wegmans Hall, gracing the entrance to the Edmund A. Hajim Science & Engineering Quadrangle, suggests a punch card—once the primary means of inputting data into a computer. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)
2014
Rochester becomes one of 15 “BRAID schools” as the computer science department joins Building, Recruiting, and Inclusion for Diversity, an initiative of the Anita Borg Institute, funded by Meta, Google, Intel, and Microsoft. Rochester’s participation, spearheaded by then department chair Sandhya Dwarkadas and then undergraduate coordinator Marty Guenther, leads to policy changes that result in a notable increase in female students.
MAJOR PROGRESS: Computer science majors (left to right) Gianna Marci ’18, Euakarn (Som) Liengtiraphan ’17, and Pooja Priya ’20, pose in the lab in 2017. (Sarah Mossey)
2023
Fall enrollment shows women make up 30 percent of undergraduate computer science majors, 10 percentage points greater than the national average.
2024
Computer science is the second most popular major, surpassed only by the biological sciences. The department graduates 125 students with bachelor’s degrees, 28 with master’s degrees, and 20 with doctorates.
