What are the broad areas of CS in academia

[dntw8up]

Hello - When I was looking at CS grad school programs in the 1970s, the chief difference among departments was a tendency to be stronger in either hardware or software. Now my son is looking at CS grad school programs and I find I need some help in order to be able to discuss his academic future with him intelligently. What I'd like to know is what the broad areas of CS are in academia today (obviously things are much more specialized than just HW and SW.) I'm also interested in learning which school have particular strength in which areas. Google tends to show me rankings for CS programs generally, not filtered by the strengths of various programs, so I'd appreciate being pointed in the right direction. - Thank you.

[metasyntactic]

Wikipedia has a broad overview of subfields: http://en.wikipedia...._science_fields

US News maintains rankings by subfield for CS. Many fields aren't represented though: http://grad-schools....science-schools

Edited April 29, 2010 by metasyntactic

[42horsemen]

Hi,

I don't know what it was like earlier, but now HW stuff is largely covered under Computer Engineering programs, and SW under Computer Science.

This is actually a decent summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science#Branches

[dntw8up]

Thank you both!

[cpu90]

Hi,

The general sub-fields of computer science (or in my case, computer science and enginenering):

Architecture

Theory and Algorithms

Database

High Performance Computing

Networking and Security

Computer Vision

Bioinformatics

Computer Graphics

Robotics

Programming Languagues

Hope that helps.

[dntw8up]

It does help -- Thank you!