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...
Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#12Quantity is a pretty poor metric. I wonder how closely it corresponds with faculty budget.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#13I'm just surprised my CS department made the list. That's nice at least. Even though we are at the bottom...
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.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#14Quantity is a pretty poor metric. I wonder how closely it corresponds with faculty budget.
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.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#15I'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?
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#16Dear MIT : one day, you will receive your deserved comeuppance. Best regards, CMU.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#17It 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...
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.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#18"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.
Signals are hard to come by in acedemic CS.
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.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#19Dear MIT : one day, you will receive your deserved comeuppance. Best regards, CMU.
This is elitism in the bad sense of the word.
Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers
#20I'm just surprised my CS department made the list. That's nice at least. Even though we are at the bottom...
This list isn't all that meaningful because they have a narrow definition of "CS theory."
It's perfectly meaningful of course if you want a ranking based on that narrow definition.