

Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers - kenjackson
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/dnd/ranking/

======
tptacek
It is hard for me to believe that uchicago.edu should outrank illinois.edu.
Illinois.edu is a famous top-tier CS program; uchicago.edu is a top-tier
university with a relatively small CS program.

~~~
cynicalkane
At U Chicago many people believe in studying _only_ academic theory. The
attitude is that if you're smart enough, you can learn everything practical in
industry... if you're one of those unworthy people who wants to go into
industry. This attitude affects undergraduates the most, but permeates the
whole academic atmosphere. It's not unexpected that a top-tier school that
focuses only on academia would outperform in producing academic papers.

Regarding undergraduate and masters' education, U Chicago degrees have top-
tier status despite much lower selectivity than comparable schools, so maybe
that attitude is worth something.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Lower selectivity? That may have been true a decade or two ago but their
accept rate is under 10% now.

~~~
cynicalkane
Seriously? When I went there it higher than 30%. That was less than 10 years
ago.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Yup - it has decreased dramatically. Its not much different from Duke now.

[https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply/class-
profile](https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply/class-profile)

------
measureit
It should be amusing that the two professors that developed this system, Saeed
and Mohammad, are both at MIT and University of Maryland, and this ranking
bumps UMD up from like #17 in CS to #7. Quite handy...

~~~
shrig94
UMD is a state university--and basically, if you're not UCB, imo state schools
suffer from the whole "ivy bias" that society tends to have.

~~~
me2i81
I'm not sure that's really true in CS. If you're not UCB, Stanford, CMU, or
MIT, you're not a "top" CS dept whether public or private. Georgia Tech, U of
Washington, UC San Diego, UIUC, UCLA, UT Austin are all credibly somewhere in
the top 20.

~~~
ghc
As someone who spent time at MIT and Georgia Tech, MIT may be a bit better but
the difference in quality of labs, resources and faculty is pretty small, with
lots of cross pollination between the schools (exe: Thad Starner jumping ship
from Media Lab to GT). I don't think you could credibly call GT anything but
top tier unless your only resource is Hacker News or you're focusing on one of
the few sub-disciplines the College of Computing (yes CS is its own
independent college, not merged with EE) doesn't have great coverage of.

Now if you combine EE+CS, I might believe you.

~~~
me2i81
In terms of actual quality, that's probably true. I've worked with people who
absolutely won't hire anyone who didn't go to one of the "top 4", and that's
the sort of mindset I was addressing. It's not an "ivy only" mindset, it's a
"Stanford-Berkeley-MIT-CMU only" (and sometimes not even CMU and Berkeley)
mindset.

~~~
ghc
Ah, the hiring equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". I've seen
the same with people only hiring Harvard Business School grads. I figure
school-based hiring practices like that are a pretty good indication of poor
management quality.

------
doktrin
Dear MIT : one day, you will receive your deserved comeuppance. Best regards,
CMU.

~~~
javert
This is elitism in the bad sense of the word.

~~~
robmccoll
Meh, reads like harmless humor to me. -no particular allegiance, perhaps
Georgia Tech

------
bottled_poe
Quantity is a pretty poor metric. I wonder how closely it corresponds with
faculty budget.

~~~
hayesbh
In general I would normally agree with this sentiment, but they're only
looking at top tier conference venues. It's very difficult to pass lackluster
work through these places, so it really isn't that terrible of a metric. I
would be more interested to see what would happen if they only included
double-blind conferences, as name recognition in peer review can help make the
rich richer.

As another commenter said, there are few reliable signals that one could
really use for this in general, let alone to get a current ranking. Citations
are a fine metric but typically it will take a few years for those to really
build up on a paper. I would be very interested to see them expand these
rankings beyond theoretical CS and into the other disciplines... particularly
robotics, where US News doesn't offer a ranking.

~~~
mjn
> It's very difficult to pass lackluster work through these places

Not really _that_ hard. It's difficult to pass outright bad work through a
top-tier conference, but above a quality threshold, it's basically a
crapshoot; the reviewing process doesn't reliably separate middling from great
papers. The very low acceptance rates (~10-15%) and very high inter-reviewer
variance [1] combine to make it pretty random whether a given paper, of
sufficiently "ok" quality, gets accepted or not. So the main successful
strategy to accumulate a lot of papers in top-tier conferences is simply to
_submit_ a lot of decent papers to top-tier conferences. How many such papers
a given professor can churn out depends largely on how many students, post-
docs, and research scientists they can hire, which depends on funding.

[1] NIPS, one of the top-tier machine learning conferences, did a very
interesting experimental study of this. [http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-
nips-experiment.html](http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-
experiment.html)

------
nicolasehrhardt
"We certainly do not claim that publication record is the best measure, or a
complete measure. However, it is the record that everyone sees and compares in
CV, for jobs, grants, reports, etc." > That always makes me really sad.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Signals are hard to come by in acedemic CS.

~~~
javert
There are no signals of value under socialism. It's a well-known problem in
economics.

Yes, academic CS is socialism---I am a CS grad student, I know. CS academics
are just sucking the public teets instead of trading value for value.

~~~
Tloewald
Sounds like as a CS person you've peripherally processed politic science and
come up with binary answers to complex ill-posed questions. Academia is not
socialism and even communism is not completely lacking in value signals
(otherwise it wouldn't be able to deliver excellent medical care, for
example).

If you're so convinced academia has no value signals it seems rather foolish
(or at minimum hypocritical) of you to pursue academic credentials.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Just to be clear, just because something isn't optimal doesn't mean its not
worth being a part of. You can be critical and not leave at the same time.
Actually, the ones who stay are the critical ones who have hopes (founded or
not) that the system can improve.

~~~
Tloewald
Having no value signals is a lot worse than being sub-optimal. Everything is
sub-optimal.

------
sytelus
Huh? So they are just counting papers published in conferences by faculty
members as ranking function? That's nuts in 2015. Exactly the reason why this
people couldn't have invented PageRank.

------
WhitneyLand
Is it the case almost none offer a degree online? Regardless of how effective
online courses become I worry most top tier schools will always opt out to try
and avoid diluting the brand. Scarcity and exclusivity use to be a resource
problem that resulted in prestige. Now it seems the prestige must be
artificially maintained by limiting the supply to anyone not happy with just a
certificate.

~~~
greenpizza13
Georgia Tech, #8, offers an online Master's of CS. I'm enrolled now and it's
quite challenging and rewarding.

~~~
eranation
Same here. Highly recommended. p.s. the tuition for the whole degree is around
$7,000. Stanford and Berkley offer an online program for $60K and $50K (the
latter is for a data science program).

------
jessaustin
I'm not an academic, but I don't understand the point of ranking both by "1"
and "1 + 1/2". 21 schools were ranked identically by each method. 18 were one
rank different. At this point we seem to be straining at gnats. Was this
really just to mess with Texas A&M?

------
akhilcacharya
I'm just surprised my CS department made the list. That's nice at least.

Even though we are at the bottom...

~~~
jasonjei
Is it NC State? I found the instruction there excellent--at least for theory
classes like Automata, Decision And Complexity Theory as well as Data
Structures. They offer a real distance education that is run just like an in-
person class, with videotaped lectures, projects, and proctored exams. They
are one the few universities that offer the full repertoire of bachelor CS
classes online, a little known secret. Even though their distance education
isn't well marketed, you could complete in theory a BS computer science
remotely just through NC State--something that you can't quite yet do with
MITx or Udacity--and in addition, their online CS classes do not have an
asterisk on your transcript indicating they were taken online, since you are
often lumped into a section with the in-person class.

~~~
kd0amg
The ranking here is about research output, not quality of teaching.

------
jagger27
How do Canadian universities compare?

------
mathetic
The title needs "in the US" at the end to be more descriptive.

------
calinet6
Cal >> Stanfurd.

