Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science - Systems and Networking

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.

The Systems group at Cornell examines the design and implementation of the fundamental software systems that form our computing infrastructure. Below we give just a small representation of the varied systems work going on here, and invite you to visit the project and faculty web pages, as well as read our papers. The increasing importance of cloud infrastructures, cloud computing and containerization are leading organizations to move growing portions of their enterprise activities out of their own data centers and into the cloud.

A baccalaureate degree from a college or university of recognized standing.
Transcripts of all previous college and university work
Statement of purpose
GRE scores - recommended, but not required
Internet-based Test (iBT) version of the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). Each section (writing: 20, Listening: 15, Reading: 20, Speaking: 22) has its own minimum score as noted. The Graduate School requires an overall band score of a 7.0 or higher on the IELTS.
Ph.D. -- three recommendations
Diversity statement (see the commitment to diversity section, below)
Cornell Computer Science no longer considers the GRE in any aspect of our admissions process