The Field of Computer Science is intended for students who are primarily interested in the general aspects of computational processes, both theoretical and practical. Areas of research in the field include algorithms, architecture, artificial intelligence, computer vision, computational biology, concurrency and distributed computing, database systems, machine learning, machine vision, natural language processing, networks, numerical analysis, programming environments, programming languages and methodology, robotics, and theory of computation. The Cornell Ph.D. program in computer science is consistently ranked among the top six departments in the country, with world-class research covering all of computer science. Our computer science program is distinguished by the excellence of the faculty, by a long tradition of pioneering research, and by the breadth of its Ph.D. program. Faculty and Ph.D. students are located both in Ithaca and in New York City at the Cornell Tech campus. The Field of Computer Science also includes faculty members from other departments (Electrical Engineering, Information Science, Applied Math, Mathematics, Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Computational Biology, and Architecture) who can supervise a student's Ph.D. thesis research in computer science.
Computing is deeply intertwined with human behavior in a number of ways. At Cornell we study them all: designing ways people interact with computing systems, ways computers mediate communication and other interaction between people, things we can learn about people by looking at those interactions, and impacts of computing on society in a number of critical domains from education to health. We have a strong presence at related conferences, including CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, KDD, WWW, and do work in a number of areas.