Two UT Dallas Engineering Programs Ranked Among Best in Texas

The computer science program at The University of Texas at Dallas ranks third in the state and 29th nationally, according to a new method for ranking universities’ graduate programs in science and engineering.

The evaluation also gives high marks to the university’s graduate program in software engineering: second in the state and 24th worldwide.

The new method for ranking academic programs is based largely on answering the question “What did your faculty publish and where?” The premise is that the ability to regularly publish research findings in highly regarded journals is a good gauge of academic excellence.

Using this approach, UT Dallas ranks above Rice University and Caltech in computer science, and it comes in just six places behind Stanford University in software engineering.

“Our faculty members are dedicated to education that’s firmly based on their leading-edge research, and these results confirm that we are gaining more and more notice as worldwide leaders in our areas of expertise,” said Dr. D.T. Huynh, head of computer science at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas.

It’s particularly gratifying to have faculty in software engineering recognized, he added, since that’s one of the Jonsson School’s newest academic programs.

Publication-based rankings have been done in the past, but the new approach to generating them is much more sophisticated, according to the authors of an article in the June issue of the Association for Computing Machinery’s monthly magazine, Communications of the ACM.

Co-developed by a software engineer from Google, the new computer-based method greatly expands upon the number of journals that can easily be considered, the authors said. It also factors in faculty participation in professional conferences, which can be an important yardstick of faculty excellence – particularly in rapidly evolving fields like computer science, the authors said.

The publication-based approach to rankings also sidesteps the potential peril of basing rankings on people’s subjective opinions about a given institution or program, although publication-based ranking “should probably serve as one quantitative indicator in a more comprehensive methodology,” the authors concluded.  

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Communications of the ACM article: “Automatic and versatile publications ranking for research institutions and scholars”

Detailed rankings from the article:

Top 50 Graduate Computing Programs in the U.S.

1: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2: University of Maryland, College Park

3: Carnegie Mellon University

4: Georgia Institute of Technology

5: Stanford University

6: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

7: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

8: University of Texas, Austin

9: Purdue University

10: University of California, Berkeley

11: University of California, San Diego

12: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

13: Rutgers University, New Brunswick

14: University of Southern California

14: University of Washington, Seattle

16: Cornell University

16: University of California, Santa Barbara

18: Michigan State University

19: University of California, Irvine

20: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

21: University of Wisconsin, Madison

22: Columbia University

22: Princeton University

24: Ohio State University

24: University of Florida, Gainesville

26: Pennsylvania State University

26: Texas A&M University

26: University of Pennsylvania

29: University of Texas, Dallas

30: State University of New York, Stony Brook

31: Oregon State University

31: University of California, Los Angeles

31: University of Virginia

34: California Institute of Technology

34: University of Arizona

34: University of Illinois, Chicago

37: State University of New York, Buffalo

38: Louisiana State University

38: Rice University

38: Washington University in St. Louis

41: Harvard University

42: Southern Methodist University

42: University of Iowa

42: University of South Florida, Tampa

45: Boston University

45: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

47: North Carolina State University

47: University of California, Davis

49: University of Colorado, Boulder

50: New York University

Top 50 Software Engineering Institutions Worldwide

1: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2: Carnegie Mellon University

3: Georgia Institute of Technology

4: University of Maryland, College Park

5: Oregon State University

6: University of California, Irvine

7: University of British Columbia

8: Politecnico di Milano, Italy

9: University of Texas, Austin

10: IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

11: University of Waterloo, Canada

12: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

13: Imperial College London

14: University College London

15: Carleton University

16: University of Paderborn

17: Purdue University

18: Stanford University

19: Kansas State University

19: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

19: Michigan State University

22: University of Pittsburgh

23: University of Colorado, Boulder

24: University of Texas, Dallas

25: University of Washington, Seattle

26: University of Toronto

27: Ohio State University

28: University of Southern California

29: University of Karlsruhe, Germany

30: Osaka University

30: University of California, Davis

32: Fraunhofer-IESE, Germany

33: University of Virginia

34: Simula Research Lab, Norway

34: Washington University in St. Louis

36: Hong Kong Polytechnic University

37: Brown University

38: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

38: University of Strathclyde, UK

40: NASA Ames Research Center

41: University of Bologna, Italy

42: University of California, San Diego

43: Avaya Labs Research

44: Northeastern University

44: West Virginia University

46: Case Western Reserve University

46: Rutgers University

48: Bell Labs, Naperville

48: Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council, Canada

48: National University of Singapore, Singapore

About UT Dallas

The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor, enrolls more than 14,500 students.  The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores.  The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs.  For additional information about UT Dallas, please visit the university’s website at www.utdallas.edu.