CMU PhD in software engineering or computer science?

[albertlee]

Hi,

I am prospective graduate school applicant. My interest lies in incorporating other computer science domains such as AI into software engineering.

Now, should I apply for a PhD in software engineering or a PhD in computer science?

What's the difference between the focus of these two programs?

please help

[Amogh]

Hi,

I am prospective graduate school applicant. My interest lies in incorporating other computer science domains such as AI into software engineering.

Now, should I apply for a PhD in software engineering or a PhD in computer science?

What's the difference between the focus of these two programs?

please help

Software engineering is the study of the process of building a large software whereas computer science is the broad term encompassing everything from ai, graphics, theory, systems, software engineering, networks etc.

[Azazel]

Hi,

I am prospective graduate school applicant. My interest lies in incorporating other computer science domains such as AI into software engineering.

Now, should I apply for a PhD in software engineering or a PhD in computer science?

What's the difference between the focus of these two programs?

please help

I have sort-of similar interests, and I applied to the "computer science" program. I'd actually suggest applying to both (CMU allows you to do this ;-)

[scyrus]

Hi,

I am prospective graduate school applicant. My interest lies in incorporating other computer science domains such as AI into software engineering.

Now, should I apply for a PhD in software engineering or a PhD in computer science?

What's the difference between the focus of these two programs?

please help

If you mean you would like to incorporate AI/machine learning techniques to improve the process of software engineering, I would say that HCI might be a good fit. Take a look at Andy Ko's or James Fogarty's work at the University of Washington (both graduated from the HCII at CMU), or Anind Dey's work at the CMU HCII.

If you mean you would like to create large scale AI applications, I would guess that you would want to apply to the Computer Science department. But, as Azazel says, you can always apply to both (at CMU, anyway).

[albertlee]

thanks so much for the reply.

The reason I am asking is, it seems that CMU's software engineering program focusses primarily on your total solution development, that is, skills in aggregating technologies for developing software solution that are often important in the industry. I have extensive research background in software engineering, especially in compiler and multi-core programming.

"Prior industrial software development experience, especially software design and programming experience as a member of a system team, is a strong asset. Students without sufficient quantity or quality of experience will spend more time during the program gaining practical experience. At a minimum, we expect that every student entering the program will have experience equivalent to two summer internships as a member of an industrial software development team."

From the description of the website above, it seems like CMU's software engineering program wants people who have used lots of technologies like AJAX, C#, you name it, before in industry say Microsoft to develop for instance web applications, mobile phone applications, etc etc. I have never used any of these. I have done programming jobs for my research developing parallel tools for scientfic data file format conversion at a US national lab, but they are all written in C, Fortran, and Java. I don't know if these programming experience for scientific computing research rather than industry software development would count. :-/ That's why I am hesitating. I don't want to apply to something if I don't even meet the obvious requirement stated on the website.

Any input to this would be highly appreciated!! :-)

Thank you

[albertlee]

sorry for this double post, but any input to my above message???

I really need to decide whether or not applying to the software engineering PhD program is worth it....

thanks!

[symbolic]

Most places are going to have only the PhD in CS. Since you're interested especially in AI, I'd say definitely go for the CS program. In it, you'll do research relating to your area of interest (like AI) and you'll learn software engineering along the way, as it applies to your work. That's what I was told--it's fine if your main interest is software engineering, but if you have a strong interest elsewhere, pursue that and you'll get a good hold on software engineering anyway.

[albertlee]

Most places are going to have only the PhD in CS. Since you're interested especially in AI, I'd say definitely go for the CS program. In it, you'll do research relating to your area of interest (like AI) and you'll learn software engineering along the way, as it applies to your work. That's what I was told--it's fine if your main interest is software engineering, but if you have a strong interest elsewhere, pursue that and you'll get a good hold on software engineering anyway.

thank you so much for your reply, symbolic.

Now, the irony is that, I only have research experience in software engineering. As far as AI goes, by the the time I apply to grad school, I will only have taken some AI classes and done some AI projects. Do you think the lack of my AI research experience would make my application weaker?

The thing is, it's pretty hard for me to get research experience in all my fields of interest.... :-/

please help