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Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

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Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#31

Post by me2i81 »

ghc wrote: post #29
me2i81 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#32

Post by ghc »

me2i81 wrote: post #31
ghc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#33

Post by greenpizza13 »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #23

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.

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

Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#35

Post by hkmurakami »

cynicalkane wrote: post #28
tptacek wrote: post #3

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.

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 pro…

This is analogous to why Princeton is so high up there as well. The school has a tremendous focus on theory even in the engineering disciplines.

(I studied electrical engineering there and as much as I hate to admit, because I wasn't motivated enough to seek out attainment of more industry-ready skills, it actually set me back significantly as an engineer)

Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#36

Post by mjn »

hayesbh wrote: post #14
bottled_poe wrote: post #12

Quantity 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, ther…

> 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

Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#38

Post by eranation »

greenpizza13 wrote: post #33
WhitneyLand wrote: post #23

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.

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

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).

Re: Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers

#40

Post by Pyxl101 »

greenpizza13 wrote: post #33
WhitneyLand wrote: post #23

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.

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

Would you mind describing a bit about what you learn or study in the program?
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