Friday, April 4, 2008

Rankings

The well-known (and very often criticized) US News Rankings have been released this year. Here are the ranking for computer science, and specifically for theory. Apparently, you don't need an account to access them.

As we all know, it is a bad idea to take these ranking too seriously, but at least they contain a list of the top schools in some order. For the theory rankings, I would diagree with the position of Stanford (too high) and Princeton (too low).

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bow before the infinite wisdom of the rankings, for they had spoken. Doubt them not!

Anonymous said...

MiP: Totally agree with you. Putting Stanford before Princeton is just to show how ignorant they could be.

For students: If you want to choose grad school, don't forget the IAS at Princeton.

Anonymous said...

Actually, Stanford is very good at theory by definition. They have their own definition of what theory means that differs from that at other places.

Luca Aceto said...

I am curious. Why is Stanford's definition of theory different from that at other places? A look at their People in CS-Theory does not seem to support this observation by the previous commenter.

Of course, it is questionable that Stanford should be above Princeton (but so are many such judgements), but it is not clear that the IAS counts as "Princeton" in this ranking. Does it? I'd guess not.

Anonymous said...

Most of the Stanford "theory" people actually do systems or more applied stuff with some theory in it (e.g. security, robotics, AI, virtual worlds, management science). And I'm not talking about the "inactive" faculty like Don Knuth, or the bunch of people who just have their names there because they work in the industry and only show up to teach a seminar every few years. There seem to be very few "basic theory" names.

Anonymous said...

We think the writer uses too much the Imperiel "we" as a sylistic choice.

Anonymous said...

Is this the same discussion as the one about the number of stocfocs papers? Will it stop if I name three theory groups in Israel that pwn the whole list?

ff

Mihai said...

there are a couple of groups in israel that are competitive with the top-5 places in the US, but let's not overdo it.