Welcome from the Chair

On a daily basis, we are seeing new computational and data-driven innovations to improve our lives: self-driving cars, augmented reality-based games and entertainment, chatbots that can automate tasks, AI-driven discoveries in health and medicine. These advances can be great positives for society.  Yet there is also a clear need to ensure our technological foundations are built in a solid, responsible, and trustworthy way.  If “AI” is making decisions for us, what should it be striving to promote and facilitate?  How do we make sure data-driven decisions are supported by the right data, and that the underlying models are understandable by and justifiable to humans?  How do we make sure our networked systems are reliable, verifiable, and secure?  How do we overcome the limits of physics to scale to larger and larger datasets?  These are some of the central themes we consider at Penn – both in computer science and in our interdisciplinary collaborations — and we continue to grow our faculty to address these challenge problems.

Our faculty and students work together with others all across campus to develop new ideas and new solutions.  Key interdisciplinary centers include the Warren Center for Network and Data Science, the Annenberg Center for Communications, the Law School, and the social sciences within the School of Arts and Sciences), the Penn Center for Health, Devices, and Technology, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the ASSET Center for Safe and Trustworthy AI and the broader IDEAS Initiative, the AI-RNA BioFoundry, and the Institute for Biomedical Informatics (also bridging to the data-driven parts of the Perelman School for Medicine).

When it comes to academic degree programs, Penn is unmatched in its breadth of offerings.  Whether you are interested in “core computer science” or its connections to digital media, artificial intelligence, devices and computer engineering, or connections to biomedicine – we have an array of undergraduate offerings.  The MCIT program gives students with undergraduate training in non-computational fields an accelerated program for developing computer science skills.  We also offer a core master’s program, as well as more specialized programs in areas such as Robotics, Embedded Systems and the Internet of Things, Graphics and Gaming Technology, and a degree in Data Science.  If you’re interested in additional cross-disciplinary themes, such as the intersection of computer science and business or law, we have dual-degree options with the Wharton School and the Law School.  Throughout these programs, we place the highest standards upon ourselves for bringing the latest research and the best teaching innovations to the classroom.

We hope that, whatever your computationally related interests, you’ll find Penn Computer and Information Science a great place to be!

Zack Ives
Adani President’s Distinguished Professor and Chair
Department of Computer and Information Science