Head's Welcome

We are all familiar in a personal sense with computing technologies: camera phones and mp3 players that connect and entertain us; websites where we can buy and sell virtually anything; technologies for talking, gaming and file-sharing over the internet; seven-day weather forecasts on TV; finding information with Google and Wikipedia; accessing money via ATMs and EFTPOS; the list is endless. We interact with computers and software hundreds of times a day, but we take the technologies for granted and seldom stop to wonder how they work.

Computer science and software engineering lie at the heart of this revolution. It all comes down to how we use algorithms to store and transform information, the basic building-block of computing. For example, advances in sound and image coding gave us camera phones and mp3 players; advances in efficient web-indexing gave us Google; advances in computer graphics gave us both life-saving medical imaging techniques and life-like gaming consoles; and advances in language processing have given us speech recognition systems and have brought automatic translation tantalizingly close.

Information-based tools are now fundamental in education, medicine, finance, communication, and entertainment. None of them would have been possible without the creative energy and analytical skills of the teams of scientists and engineers that conceived, designed, and built them. All of those teams included computer scientists, specialists in algorithms and information; and software engineers, professionals who develop large software systems. Together they built a new way of life, the "information society" that our students have been born into.

The Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne has been part of the technology revolution for more than fifty years, and is an international leader in in both teaching and research. The year 2008 marks a further significant milestone, with the introduction of the new "Melbourne Model", and a suite of world class undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.

Please take a few minutes to explore this website and to ask yourself two critical questions: Do you believe that the rapid pace of development in information technologies will continue in the coming decades? Do you want to help develop and apply those technologies, whatever they are? If your answers to both questions are "yes" then you have come to the right place to pursue your ambitions. Welcome to our excitement.

Alistair Moffat
Head of Department

PS: If you are interested in our research activities, and in research degrees, visit our research pages for more information; if you are interested in coming here to enrol in a first degree, have a look at our Undergraduate courses.