Cornell Bowers CIS comprises three departments—Computer Science, Information Science, and Statistics and Data Science—and has a variety of top-ranked programs and acclaimed research.
This unique structure fuels collaboration across disciplines and the university’s campuses to position Cornell as a leader in developing and driving the visionary research and technological advances that connect people, information, and ideas.
The college’s academic footprint extends well beyond the university’s Ithaca campus. In New York City, its ties with Cornell Tech have created a powerful technology ecosystem that is unique in all of higher education.
Ranked among the best in the world, Cornell’s Department of Computer Science is distinguished both by its contributions to the core challenges of the field and by its interdisciplinary spirit. The department has long excelled in the areas that serve as intellectual foundations: theoretical computer science, programming languages, distributed systems, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, scientific computing, and computer graphics. Among other interdisciplinary areas, it leads in security, reliable computing systems, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Faculty have also pioneered the emerging fields of computational sustainability and computational social science.
Among a myriad of contributions, Cornell researchers are establishing the computing and mathematical framework that supports practical applications from game theory and network modeling that inform large-scale social platforms, to logic and formal verification that help build reliable systems.
The Department of Information Science was born in the early 2000s to address the growing opportunities, interactions, and challenges at the intersection of computing and society. Bolstered by Cornell’s historic, cross-disciplinary strength in computer science and social science, the department has rapidly grown to a position of global leadership.
Information Science is fundamentally concerned with the human-centered aspects of computing and information—ranging from how individuals interact with computing devices, to studying people through their social and information network use, and understanding the way computing systems affect our society and culture. Areas of distinction include: human-computer interaction; computational social science; science and technology studies; ethics, law, and policy; interaction and critical design; network analysis; market and mechanism design; and machine learning and natural language processing. In recent years, the department has added new emphases in digital humanities, accessibility, human-robot interaction, algorithmic fairness, accountability and transparency, information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), and learning analytics.
The Department of Statistics and Data Science’s academic and research programs take advantage of Cornell’s extensive resources, drawing from many colleges and research groups. Its unique cross-college structure encourages collaboration and innovative, interdisciplinary pedagogy in a field that is increasingly central in identifying and addressing the most pressing problems of the modern world through the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty.
The department develops and combines modern statistics methodology with data science and machine learning to advance the biological, physical, and social sciences. Other departmental specializations include mathematical statistics, computational statistics, as well as the development of statistical methods for fields ranging from agriculture, astrophysics, ecology, economics, and epidemiology, to financial modeling, imaging, genomics, medicine, neurobiology, public health, risk management, and the law.
Awards
Cornell Bowers CIS faculty lead in their fields, with honors and awards including:
2
Turing Award Recipients
3
IEEE Von Neumann Medal Recipients
9
Members of the National Academy of Engineering
4
Members of the National Academy of Sciences
7
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
3
MacArthur Fellows
30
ACM Fellows
8
Guggenheim Fellows
30
Sloan Fellows
58
NSF Career Award Fellows
Student Enrollment
Enrollment in Cornell Bowers CIS has grown sixfold over the past decade, with a record 2,000 majors in spring 2022; more than 76% of all Cornell undergraduates take at least one Cornell Bowers CIS class.
%
of Cornell Bowers CIS majors are women
%
of Cornell Bowers CIS majors are underrepresented minorities
A History of Innovation @ Cornell Bowers CIS
1965
Department of Computer Science formed; Juris Hartmanis appointed chair.
Gerard Salton, “the father of information retrieval,” brings his SMART system to Cornell.
1966
First Ph.D. in Computer Science awarded.
1974
Program of Computer Graphics, started under Don Greenberg, receives NSF funding, first of its kind.
1978
Computer Science introduces bachelor’s degrees with partner colleges.
1979
John Hopcroft publishes “Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation” with colleague Jeffrey Ullman.
1985
Cornell Theory Center founded, one of only four NSF supercomputer centers.
1991
arXiv founded, an open-access archive of scientific articles.
1999
Faculty of Computing and Information Science established.
2002
Information science Ph.D. program established.
2005
Department of Statistical Sciences joins CIS.
2010
Department of Information Science established.
2011
Cornell Tech wins NYC Competition.
2014
Gates Hall becomes new home for CIS.
2017
Cornell Tech dedicated in New York City.
2019
CIS celebrates 20 years.
Department of Statistics and Data Science established.
2020
Transformative gift from Ann S. Bowers ’59, CIS renamed the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
2021
Over 1,000 degrees granted.
2022
2,000 undergraduate student majors.
Cornell Bowers CIS: A bold experiment
Cornell University undertook a bold experiment in 1999 when it created its combined Faculty of Computing and Information Science (“CIS”) as an interdisciplinary unit that would ultimately see its people, programs, and projects embedded throughout the university.
Now, 23 years after its founding, Cornell Bowers CIS continues to push boundaries in the information age through its commitment to both developing state-of-the-art computing and information technologies, and in studying and understanding the societal and human impact of these technologies.