
CS Rankings excludes important CS research from ECE/EE deptartments - l31g
http://csrankings.org/faq.html
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azhenley
One of the exclusions that I find interesting is any faculty that has a joint
position at a company. A lot of great professors get 0 credit because of this.

Another one is that you are penalized for having student authors on your
papers.

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l31g
According to csrankings.org's FAQ, they only include professors who can advise
a CS-only student. The conflict is that the website includes areas (like
"Embedded & real-time systems", "Robotics", and "Computer Architecture") that
are traditionally done in EE and ECE departments. One significant example is
UT Austin's prolific ECE department.

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lazyjeff
I'm sure Emery who runs csrankings.org has thought of this and that criteria
"professors who can advise a CS-only student" is well thought out. Anyone who
comes up with rankings/datasets has to determine a set of inclusion/exclusion
criteria, which will be unsatisfying to some people. CS research can certainly
be done in many different departments including iSchools, math, media studies,
operation/management science, but this is a ranking of CS institutions rather
than CS research, even if we think the latter is more useful.

Your reference to "traditionally done in EE and ECE departments" is to say
that your (and perhaps others') view of what computer science traditionally
is, should take precedence over the universities' self-definitions. The former
(which depends on different peoples' perspectives of what is CS) is harder to
to delineate in a universally-agreeable way than the latter (which has
essentially no subjectivity). So I'd imagine a website like this which is used
as a wide reference, will want to reduce as much of the author's own
subjectivity as possible, to actually be acceptable to a wide range of people.

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_delirium
The explanation he's given is that the primary purpose of the website is to
help prospective graduate students evaluate strength of CS PhD programs when
deciding where to apply. For that purpose, it only makes sense to include
people who can advise CS PhD students. This excludes not only research done in
EE/ECE departments, but also research done in companies, or in departments
without a PhD program (there are some strong ones at undergraduate-only
colleges), since that's outside the scope of finding PhD programs.

That's fine as far as it goes, but the website has gotten popular as a general
research ranking for a few of these subfields, beyond the original purpose of
helping CS grad students choose programs to apply to. For some of those other
purposes the original decisions may or may not make sense. The name of the
website probably doesn't help either.

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sotero32
Shouldn't the purpose be to help prospective graduate students evaluate the
strength of PhD programs in the fields they are interested in?

I think that excluding research in companies or universities without PhD
programs is much different than excluding EE/ECE professors who happen to be
at universities where the bureaucracy makes it difficult for them to have some
sort of "official" appointment in the CS department. It is also much more rare
that these entities publish in the top-tier conferences that csrankings
counts.

Note that it is not just professors who can advise CS PhD students, it is
professors who can SOLELY advise a student for a CS degree. It would help even
if EE professors who have co-advised CS PhDs at the same university were
allowed to be included.

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LolWolf
Huh, not sure why Stephen Boyd is not included in the Stanford list, but John
Duchi is (if you’re reading this John, I’m only a little sorry! ;). He’s on
the top 10 highest citation count of all Stanford professors behind
essentially Hastie and Tibshirani (both of _Elements of Statistical Learning_
fame), and both of which I’m also surprised are not included, even though they
can all advise CS-only students.

This is a bit silly of course because Stanford has a full cross-department
policy, where the student’s department and their PhD advisors can be
_completely unrelated_. (I’m not exaggerating at all when I’m saying this, and
this policy also includes the Business and Medicine schools. There are EE
professors who have business school students even without a courtesy
appointment in the school of business. Similar things happen in the Medical
school, etc.)

I wonder how that (for Stanford and other schools) would change the rankings.

