UNC computer science department looks to the future as it celebrates 60th anniversary

UNC’s highly-ranked Department of Computer Science celebrated its 60th anniversary, hosting events last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The department continues to grow, hiring new faculty and drawing in more students. 

A.M. Turing Award winner Frederick P. Brooks Jr. created the department in 1964, making it the second oldest in the country. 

Events that celebrated the anniversary included a networking session with computer science alumni, research talks featuring newer faculty and an open house. 

Emilie Mutoniwabo, a UNC CS student ambassador and sophomore majoring in computer science and information science, attended two of the three events held for the anniversary. 

Mutoniwabo said they thought the events were “pretty awesome,” well-planned by the department’s external relations team and popular with the community. They also said it was really nice to talk to people who were a part of the department from its inception. 

“The comp sci department is not old. It’s only sixty years old. And so, the people who came there in the beginning, they're still with us, and they want to come back where there's these three events. You know, people do it to talk to everyone,” Mutoniwabo said. 

Mutoniwabo said UNC wasn’t originally in their college plan, and they didn’t know if they would fit in. However, Mutoniwabo found a community and place for themself in the department. 

“Through the UNC student ambassadors team, and also through extracurriculars, such as student organizations, CS organizations and going to hackathons and going to office hours with my classmates, that all gradually allowed me to become more comfortable and more welcome,” Mutoniwabo said. 

Roni Sengupta, an assistant professor who has been in the department for three years, presented a research talk titled “Building AI Models for Perceiving the Physical World.” 

In an interview with The Daily Tar Heel, Sengupta said that UNC has been a very “collegial department” for new faculty members. She said the department has a lot of good mentorship programs, and that senior faculty members reach out to make sure new faculty members are adjusting well. 

“Fred [Brooks] was a very gentle human being, and he sort of baked into the DNA of this place that we're going to get along and be collegial, and it's stuck and it's a very nice place to work,” Department Chair James Anderson said. 

Sengupta also said the department was founded on the principle of being a toolsmith for other departments. 

“I felt this is a very unique thing about UNC computer science that we really encourage researchers to go out and talk to other researchers across the campus and build collaboration and show how computing can be used in their discipline,” Sengupta said.

Sengupta said the growing use of AI in the field has also led the department to hire more faculty members with that type of experience, saying that around 70 percent of recent hires have "something to do with AI."

Anderson said the department needs more tenure track faculty so students can gain research opportunities. 

“The prestige and the ranking of the department hinges upon the research being done, and that's done by the tenure track faculty,” Anderson said. 

Anderson also said that the department’s importance is highlighted through a change in student demand. 

"About 10 years ago, it started to explode," Anderson said. "And it just, we went from teaching classes of 40 undergrads to teaching classes of 300 undergrads. And so the demand just skyrocketed."

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