Top 10 CS/Tech Schools | Most Cutting-Edge Category

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<p>No, not including any other UC. Berkeley blows CMU and Cornell out the water when it comes to information technology. Yes, CMU is great in CS, but like I said, Berkeley not only has a comparably sized faculty, but it has consistently produced the highest-quality research (probably why Berkeley CS PhD graduates dominate in academia, and Cornell and CMU PhD graduates don’t). CMU doesn’t match the concentration of quality that Berkeley has; CMU has a lot of CS faculty who are just “eh.” The same goes for Cornell. On top of that, Berkeley has a definite advantage over CMU and Cornell for EE. </p>

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<p>Well, I considered nanotech only because you seemed to want that, but it doesn’t fall under the purvey of EECS/IT. If you include nanotech, then there’s no reason not to include various other engineering disciplines.</p>

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<p>Well, I’m going more by the quality of the research as judged by the academic community, not by whether I think it’s cool. I don’t care for robotics at all, really. Also, judging schools based on 2 projects doesn’t speak to their overall quality, so perhaps that’s your problem: when you consider their IT research on the whole, Cornell’s falls far behind Berkeley’s.</p>

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<p>That’s not true at all. I would say that Berkeley undergrad in general might not be quite as good as Cornell’s (though theirs is nothing to scream and shout about either), but when it comes to engineering, Berkeley is easily equal to them in resources dedicated to undergrads. That includes CS in either the engineering school or L&S.</p>

<p><a href=“strength%20of%20faculty,%20strength%20of%20student%20body,%20resources%20per%20student%20allocation,%20etc.”>quote</a>, CMU and Cornell each win out over Berkeley.

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<p>I don’t know where you’re coming up with that. Nobody would even attempt to claim that CMU and Cornell’s engineering faculty even approach Berkeley’s. As a demonstration, Berkeley has 87 members in the NAE, while CMU has 21 and Cornell has about the same, IIRC; Berkeley’s affiliated with 15 Turing Award winners, CMU 10, Cornell a couple (I think 2). When you look at overall faculty strength, as measured by other awards and by the impact of their research, CMU compares to Berkeley in CS, but Berkeley leaves both of them behind in both IT and overall engineering.</p>

<p>For another, Berkeley engineering is extremely selective for undergrads, definitely more selective than CMU and comparable to Cornell engineering. So when it comes to competitiveness of student body, Berkeley is deservedly #3 for undergrad. And for grad, it wins easily.</p>

<p>But you seem to be changing your criteria again. Are you or are you not considering engineering? Are you focusing solely on undergrad?</p>

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<p>I already did. The projects you saw from Berkeley are at the forefront of their respective fields; their groundbreaking research continually redefines the field, much more so than Cornell. Really, Cornell just doesn’t compare to Berkeley in IT.</p>

<p>The top 5 ranking I give you is how academia views them, for both CS and EE combined; it’s mostly based on their research productivity and the impact of that research (though MIT and Stanford both could claim to #1 for IT in academia’s eyes). Fortunately, how academia regards Berkeley’s EE/CS/IT highly doesn’t depend on whether someone on the internet finds a project of theirs “cool.” ;)</p>

<p>Stanford has one-upped everyone doing autonomous vehicles by coming up with amazingly skilled autonomous helicopters. This is a really interesting video from the guy who co-invented one of the most important algorithms in machine learning and AI (latent dirichlet allocation):</p>

<p>[YouTube</a> - The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Andrew Ng, Stanford University, STAN 2011)](<a href=“The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Andrew Ng, Stanford University, STAN 2011) - YouTube”>The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Andrew Ng, Stanford University, STAN 2011) - YouTube)</p>

<p>Pretty cool video. But, Ng makes it sound as if helicopters are incredibly difficult to fly. Remote controlled toy helicopters are pretty common and fly extremely well. I assume that the toy manufacturers have built in limiting factors in the helicopter so that it’s easy for a kid to get it to fly. If the capabilities of the model helicopter are limited in some fashion then it doesn’t seem to me as if adding autonomous function is so much of an advance over what everyone else is doing. Then again, I’ll admit I have no clue.</p>

<p>^ yeah, it’s hard for us to judge just how difficult it is unless we’re actually doing the research. From my knowledge of other areas of AI (which is my area of expertise), the helicopter problem would be pretty difficult. In terms of the autonomous vehicles, I’d say that cars are the hardest, then helicopters, then boats.</p>

<p>Of course, I’m not doing the research, so I could be wrong.</p>