jeffhuang

I was the PhD admissions chair in computer science at Brown University last year, and my students and I have put together a set of resources that I think would be useful for computer science grad applicants, so thought this would be a good place to share. One is our meta rankings for computer science departments in the United States. You may already be familiar with US News and csrankings.org but each has their own biases. So the one we put together has 4 separate ranking sources and you can see how they each have "preferences": https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/ A second resource is this large spreadsheet of computer science professor profiles in the United States and Canada, covering most top computer science departments. You can filter and sort by university and subarea and when they joined, and where they got their degrees. The data is publicly editable like Wikipedia so please go ahead and provide corrections if you see errors. This could be a nice way to quickly find professors in your field of interest: https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csprofessors/ Finally, if you're looking into papers to read in different areas, we've compiled the directory of best paper awards covering a large set of top computer science conferences: https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards/ I'd love to hear if you find these useful. Good luck everyone, and I'll monitor this thread for a short while after, if you have any questions or comments.

I'm a computer science professor and chair of the admissions committee in computer science at Brown University. As part of graduate application season, I'm doing an "ask me anything". I'll answer questions while this is on the front page. I'm can talk about anything, but to mention a few things we've done as an admissions committee this year: 1) Dropped the GRE requirement https://www.academia.org/ivy-league-schools-drop-gre-requirement-for-some-graduate-programs/ 2) Broader application fee waivers see FAQ at https://cs.brown.edu/degrees/doctoral/applications/ 3) Outreach to nearby liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, women's colleges, smaller universities in the region, etc. Happy to answer any questions about PhD admissions and policies, Brown CS specifically, grad school life, give my own opinion as a faculty member who admits students myself, or anything. Minor edit: also invited the former admissions chair to this thread (it was his idea to do this AMA), and cross-posted on the gradadmissions subreddit on reddit.com