CS Programs

Computer Science at AU

The Department of Computer Science at American University balances the practical and theoretical aspects of computer science and provides students with a background for professional employment or further study in the discipline. Our graduates move on to a wide range of careers that includes software development and design, multimedia computing, artificial intelligence and computer vision, and other technical computing professions.

As a student in our department, you will:

Master state-of-the-art technologies necessary to keep pace with this rapidly changing field.
Receive individual attention in classes with fewer than 20 students.
Conduct research and complete independent studies with faculty members actively researching a variety of fields, including: artificial intelligence, scientific computing, databases and knowledge discovery, computer architecture, computational geometry, and computer vision.
Obtain internships and utilize resources at the various high-tech companies and government agencies in the Washington, DC area, including: IBM, Mellon Bank, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a variety of nonprofit organizations and start-up companies

Bulletins

Job opening: We're hiring for a new Term Faculty position, to start in Fall 2022.

David Dunleavy (MS '22) won the Graduate Physical Sciences Workshop at the Mathias Student Research Conference.

American Magazine wrote about the career of Vandi Verma (CAS/MS ’96), chief robotic operations engineer for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover.

Kristina McChesney (MS '22) was part of the team that won first place in the Hack-for-a-Change hackathon, with a website intended as a one-stop sustainability shop for small businesses such as DC-area restaurants.

The cybersecurity publication README covered current research by Nathalie Japkowicz and Zois Boukouvalas on building a statistics-based AI model to identify the spread of false information on social media platforms.

The National Science Foundation has funded two large projects in the past year with Computer Science faculty involvement. Krzysztof Pietroszek (PI, SOC) and Bei Xiao (co-PI, Computer Science) received $1 million to build a state-of-the-art volumetric capture studio, which will enable research projects in virtual and augmented reality. Jessica Gephart (PI, Environmental Science) and Alex Godwin (co-PI, Computer Science) received $785,000 to make seafood trade data more accessible to researchers through downloadable analysis and visualization packages.

The department launched a new Cybersecurity Minor open to undergraduate students from any major.

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