Research
The UT Dallas Computer Science Department started as a small program in the early 1970s and remained so until the late 1990s. The rapid growth of the high-tech industry taking place in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the 1990s led to the expansion of the UT Dallas CS Department, taking it from a small-sized faculty to one that ranks in the top 10 in tenure-track faculty size among all CS departments in the United States. With the rapid growth in faculty strength came the expansion of research and rapid growth in extramural funding. A five-year $50 Million investment from the State of Texas building upon a partnership between the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and Texas Instruments—dubbed Project Emmit—further boosted research in the CS Department. The project led to the hiring of prominent faculty members who went on to build upon the strong foundation of rich research culture. It should be noted that research at the UT Dallas CS Department has had a distinguished past with luminaries such as Henry Fuchs, Avi Silberschatz, and Zvi Kedem gracing the CS department with their presence in the 1970s. As Project Emmit ended in 2008, funding was replaced by external grants from agencies such as the NSF, DARPA, IARPA, AFOSR, ARO, ONR, and EPA. Today the CS Department’s external funding averages more than $9 Million annually. The Department is renowned for its groundbreaking research in cyber security, machine learning, automated reasoning, software engineering, computing theory, interactive systems, and networking. It counts as its faculty 17 NSF CAREER Award winners, 3 Air Force Young Investigators, and 1 ARO Young Investigator.