Welcome to CS@JHU. I would like to relate some news and highlights from the past year and discuss the future of our community. Although the current climate for scientific research is turbulent with major changes at the federal agencies that sponsor research, the department remains committed to maintaining its community and research capabilities. We will continue to grow our education and research programs now and for the foreseeable future.
The 2024–2025 academic year was exciting for our department as we continued to live, learn, teach, and research using large language models and other foundational artificial intelligence. Our researchers have been advancing the technological capabilities of AI while remaining attentive to the ethical and social implications of these technologies. For example, they developed a co-creative AI partner for creating visual stories, such as web cartoons and instructional videos. One challenge was to implement safeguards against the AI introducing biased or harmful content without curtailing authors’ creativity. Another team taught AI agents how to say “I don’t know” in an effort to mitigate hallucinations in high-stakes decision-making with a new reasoning framework that uses different “odds” to encourage AI to respond more accurately.
Beyond AI, the department remains committed to foundational computer science and its application to information technology, health, medicine, industry, and society. Our researchers have developed new data structures and software to transfer annotations between the genomes of different species, greatly accelerating the genome mapping of new species and revealing new evolutionary relationships.
Our faculty remain at the forefront of innovation. I am proud to report that Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Alex Szalay was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. His work on big data computing led to a digital revolution in astronomy and astrophysics, resulting in a deeper understanding of the structure formation and nature of dark matter in the universe.
We are also evolving how we conduct research and translate discoveries into practice, collaborating with industry partners to ensure that we’re working on the most important problems and that our solutions contribute value to society. The Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI gives fellowships to students and awards grants to faculty to work with Amazon researchers to better understand natural language, improve image-based web search, and enhance virtual commerce. We are also proud to work with Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures to foster local entrepreneurship and have partnered with the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship to administer our Singhal Family Entrepreneurship Awards, which help launch student-run software ventures.
The Department of Computer Science continues to grow in size, quality, and diversity. Our community includes more than 700 undergraduate majors, 300 master’s students, 200 PhD students, 45 tenure-track faculty, and ten teaching faculty. We are in the process of doubling the size of our research community by 2029 as part of an historic commitment by the university to build the nation’s foremost destination for research in data science, machine learning, and AI. In 2024 alone, we added 14 new faculty in the research areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, programming languages, and information security.
We encourage you to explore how you might participate in CS@JHU. Our website provides a good introduction to our research and education programs, but I invite you to contact or visit us directly if you have additional questions, have a vision of how to join or partner with us, or just want to learn more.
Randal Burns, Bill and Lisa Stromberg Department Head and professor of computer science