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Analysis of Over 2,000 Computer Science Professors at Top Universities

sytelus 12y ago
It strikes me that you can use faculty publications and PageRank algorithm to assign a score to each faculty member. Then you can actually find out which university has the strongest CS department. You can extend this to may be other fields to rank universities for each major and replace things like Patersons guide and other university ranking systems which are rather arbitrary.
- fdr 12y ago
  I think you may be interested in the "h-index" and related metrics. http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex
  - shazeline 12y ago
    I wrote a quick script to generate a list similar to (but not as deep or well-annotated as) Prof Palsberg's. https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 It's a BFS for Google Scholar seeded with Herbert Simon.
  - sytelus 12y ago
    The h-index seems like much weaker metric than PageRank. For instance, consider 10 professors you decides to game this. They will create 100 fake papers and cite each other in all. Now suddenly they would have h-index of 100! PageRank is recursive metric in graph. In above case, if above 10 professors don't have any other links pointing to them, they don't get ranked higher. PageRank was designed to eliminate scenarios like above. It's amusing that Google Scholar doesn't use PageRank prominently instead of these weaker metrics.
    - avar 12y ago
      Aren't there areas of scientific research where people doing genuinely valuable research don't get cited at all except within a closed community? I'd imagine e.g. that a handful of researchers all studying some obscure animal species would have a high h-index but a very low PageRank.
    - eegilbert 12y ago
      An experiment that did just that a few years ago: "Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting" by Delgado Lopez-Cozar, et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 [edit: grammar]
    - Anon84 12y ago
      You can even do something similar at the city level and see which city is the most influential in Science (or physics in this case): http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01640.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01...
    - warrenmar 12y ago
      "weaker" metrics can be useful, because you can understand it better. If I tell you a PageRank of an author is 3.452. That means nothing to me. If I tell you somebody's h-index is 18. That means they published 18 papers that got 18 citations each. The h-index is useful for comparing people in the same field. There is also a metric for journals called impact factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
- warrenmar 12y ago
  PageRank was originally designed for this purpose.
  - pjbrunet 12y ago
    Care to elaborate?
    - e_modad 12y ago
      I think warrenmar is referring to the fact a paper's impact can be measured by counting the number of times other authors cite the original paper. IIRC, Larry and Sergey used that idea as the conceptual framework behind PageRank. Indeed, they were right: the relevance of a search result can be increased tremendously by indexing as many pages as possible and then calculating how many people are linking to said page. They don't do it like that anymore but that's the basic idea.
    - warrenmar 12y ago
      The original funding Larry got was from the Digital Library Initiative. Then the web blew up. Maybe I shouldn't say PageRank was designed for citations, but that is where it draws its influence from. Things don't magically pop out of no where. But if you look at the PageRank algorithm, it looks like it is designed for paper citations. As a graduate student, you start a some place and you end up at a different place from where you intended to end up. My point is that one shouldn't be surprised to see that PageRank would work well for paper citations. http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - aidanf 12y ago
      PageRank evolved from Kleinberg's Hubs and Authorities[1], which partly evolved from work in ranking research papers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm
- delian66 12y ago
  I wonder what the equivalent of link farms and spam in such a system would be ?
  - chrismaeda 12y ago
    The Information Systems literature.
  - streptomycin 12y ago
    Self citation and publishing very similar articles multiple times. Both are already problems, since they work well to game many currently used citation metrics.
vladtaltos 12y ago
and here I thought they're going to rank them according to the length and bushiness of their beards...
curiousDog 12y ago
Over a 100 professors just from the IITs. Incredible.
- ycaspirant 12y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking that if you added up all the IIT placements, they would be second only to MIT, but perhaps it's not fair to add them up like that, because each one is a separate institution.
  - statguy 12y ago
    and the table doesn't include Kharagpur (and Roorkee, Guwahati) because their percentages are smaller. It is conceivable that if they were all added up, they might even surpass MIT. But as you said, its not fair.
srcreigh 12y ago
Sad to see the University of Waterloo (Canada) not on the list. It would be nice to see its comparison to US schools.
smoyer 12y ago
This is an interesting analysis and I can think of two opposing scenarios that might both be important (note that this is purely speculation based on observing people in industry): 1) Having more full professors might indicate a strength in the core math and theories behind CS. This field is much slower moving than the "technology du jour", so continuity and continued thought is important. 2) Associate and assistant professors (in theory younger and more attuned to the latest technology fads) might be what ties the almost real-time advances to the backing theories. If my hypothesis holds true (and I have no data that proves it does), then balanced CS departments would be most effective. Many times having a broader demographic is advantageous, so this shouldn't be a surprise.
- brudgers 12y ago
  The number of full professors appears to have some correlation to the reputation of a CS department, but for state universities political climate also probably plays a role - few if any departments at Florida have a high ratio of tenured professors. This is true throughout the system and probably reflects policy more than anything else - not the Florida is necessarily a top CS destination.
Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
The upward trends in the hiring graph do not show that "there is growth in computer science". If I am hired by a university in 2002, another in 2007 and another in 2012, I will only show up in the graph for 2012 because they are getting hiring dates from current professor data. So that graph does not say much about growth.
simplekoala 12y ago
It is remarkable that top 4 IITs combined make up 5.2% of undergrad degrees of CS professors right after MIT 5.9% and ahead of Harvard at 3.1%. What is even more impressive is the fact that these four IITs admit around 140-150 students into the Computer Science program every year. It will be interesting to know how many undergrads graduate with CS/EE degrees from MIT and Harvard. Nehru's vision (India's first prime minister) for creating IITs was producing best technical minds for the development of new independent India, what happened instead was IITs attracted the best and brightest in India and became the number one exporter of top technical minds to USA. This brain-drain seemed to have slowed down a bit in the last decade.
- hga 12y ago
  "It will be interesting to know how many undergrads graduate with CS/EE degrees from MIT...." Before the dot.com crash, it was ~ 40% of the undergraduates for more than a couple of decades, ~ 400 students. After, enrollment dropped by a bit more than half, and as of late it's climbed back up a great deal. Is that 140-150 students total for those 4 ITTs, or for each?
  - statguy 12y ago
    Until the late 90s it was about 35 per IIT for CS, so about 140 for the top 4 IITs. After that it was about 50 per IIT, so 200 in all. Double these numbers if you want to include EE as well.
- mathattack 12y ago
  I suspect that many non-CS folks go onto CS Phd programs. I have heard that undergrad major at top Indian schools reflecting signaling (certain majors in certain years get the better students, independent of student interest) which is why major isn't a reliable indicator. (Not so much in the US too) Having worked with many folks from IIT, it is a fantastic source of raw intelligence. I view it more similar to CalTech. Coming from a rich family, being a star athlete, or student body leader doesn't help. It's all about the academics.
  - 12y ago
cabinpark 12y ago
Analysis of Over 2,000 Computer Science Professors at Top US Universities I was expecting universities from all around the world but this is just the US.

It strikes me that you can use faculty publications and PageRank algorithm to assign a score to each faculty member. Then you can actually find out which university has the strongest CS department. You can extend this to may be other fields to rank universities for each major and replace things like Patersons guide and other university ranking systems which are rather arbitrary.

fdr 12y ago
I think you may be interested in the "h-index" and related metrics. http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex
- shazeline 12y ago
  I wrote a quick script to generate a list similar to (but not as deep or well-annotated as) Prof Palsberg's. https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 It's a BFS for Google Scholar seeded with Herbert Simon.
- sytelus 12y ago
  The h-index seems like much weaker metric than PageRank. For instance, consider 10 professors you decides to game this. They will create 100 fake papers and cite each other in all. Now suddenly they would have h-index of 100! PageRank is recursive metric in graph. In above case, if above 10 professors don't have any other links pointing to them, they don't get ranked higher. PageRank was designed to eliminate scenarios like above. It's amusing that Google Scholar doesn't use PageRank prominently instead of these weaker metrics.
  - avar 12y ago
    Aren't there areas of scientific research where people doing genuinely valuable research don't get cited at all except within a closed community? I'd imagine e.g. that a handful of researchers all studying some obscure animal species would have a high h-index but a very low PageRank.
  - eegilbert 12y ago
    An experiment that did just that a few years ago: "Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting" by Delgado Lopez-Cozar, et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 [edit: grammar]
  - Anon84 12y ago
    You can even do something similar at the city level and see which city is the most influential in Science (or physics in this case): http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01640.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01...
  - warrenmar 12y ago
    "weaker" metrics can be useful, because you can understand it better. If I tell you a PageRank of an author is 3.452. That means nothing to me. If I tell you somebody's h-index is 18. That means they published 18 papers that got 18 citations each. The h-index is useful for comparing people in the same field. There is also a metric for journals called impact factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
warrenmar 12y ago
PageRank was originally designed for this purpose.
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - e_modad 12y ago
    I think warrenmar is referring to the fact a paper's impact can be measured by counting the number of times other authors cite the original paper. IIRC, Larry and Sergey used that idea as the conceptual framework behind PageRank. Indeed, they were right: the relevance of a search result can be increased tremendously by indexing as many pages as possible and then calculating how many people are linking to said page. They don't do it like that anymore but that's the basic idea.
  - warrenmar 12y ago
    The original funding Larry got was from the Digital Library Initiative. Then the web blew up. Maybe I shouldn't say PageRank was designed for citations, but that is where it draws its influence from. Things don't magically pop out of no where. But if you look at the PageRank algorithm, it looks like it is designed for paper citations. As a graduate student, you start a some place and you end up at a different place from where you intended to end up. My point is that one shouldn't be surprised to see that PageRank would work well for paper citations. http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - aidanf 12y ago
    PageRank evolved from Kleinberg's Hubs and Authorities[1], which partly evolved from work in ranking research papers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm
delian66 12y ago
I wonder what the equivalent of link farms and spam in such a system would be ?
- chrismaeda 12y ago
  The Information Systems literature.
- streptomycin 12y ago
  Self citation and publishing very similar articles multiple times. Both are already problems, since they work well to game many currently used citation metrics.

vladtaltos 12y ago

and here I thought they're going to rank them according to the length and bushiness of their beards...

curiousDog 12y ago

Over a 100 professors just from the IITs. Incredible.

ycaspirant 12y ago
Yeah, I was thinking that if you added up all the IIT placements, they would be second only to MIT, but perhaps it's not fair to add them up like that, because each one is a separate institution.
- statguy 12y ago
  and the table doesn't include Kharagpur (and Roorkee, Guwahati) because their percentages are smaller. It is conceivable that if they were all added up, they might even surpass MIT. But as you said, its not fair.

srcreigh 12y ago

Sad to see the University of Waterloo (Canada) not on the list. It would be nice to see its comparison to US schools.

smoyer 12y ago

This is an interesting analysis and I can think of two opposing scenarios that might both be important (note that this is purely speculation based on observing people in industry): 1) Having more full professors might indicate a strength in the core math and theories behind CS. This field is much slower moving than the "technology du jour", so continuity and continued thought is important. 2) Associate and assistant professors (in theory younger and more attuned to the latest technology fads) might be what ties the almost real-time advances to the backing theories. If my hypothesis holds true (and I have no data that proves it does), then balanced CS departments would be most effective. Many times having a broader demographic is advantageous, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

brudgers 12y ago
The number of full professors appears to have some correlation to the reputation of a CS department, but for state universities political climate also probably plays a role - few if any departments at Florida have a high ratio of tenured professors. This is true throughout the system and probably reflects policy more than anything else - not the Florida is necessarily a top CS destination.

Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago

The upward trends in the hiring graph do not show that "there is growth in computer science". If I am hired by a university in 2002, another in 2007 and another in 2012, I will only show up in the graph for 2012 because they are getting hiring dates from current professor data. So that graph does not say much about growth.

simplekoala 12y ago

It is remarkable that top 4 IITs combined make up 5.2% of undergrad degrees of CS professors right after MIT 5.9% and ahead of Harvard at 3.1%. What is even more impressive is the fact that these four IITs admit around 140-150 students into the Computer Science program every year. It will be interesting to know how many undergrads graduate with CS/EE degrees from MIT and Harvard. Nehru's vision (India's first prime minister) for creating IITs was producing best technical minds for the development of new independent India, what happened instead was IITs attracted the best and brightest in India and became the number one exporter of top technical minds to USA. This brain-drain seemed to have slowed down a bit in the last decade.

hga 12y ago
"It will be interesting to know how many undergrads graduate with CS/EE degrees from MIT...." Before the dot.com crash, it was ~ 40% of the undergraduates for more than a couple of decades, ~ 400 students. After, enrollment dropped by a bit more than half, and as of late it's climbed back up a great deal. Is that 140-150 students total for those 4 ITTs, or for each?
- statguy 12y ago
  Until the late 90s it was about 35 per IIT for CS, so about 140 for the top 4 IITs. After that it was about 50 per IIT, so 200 in all. Double these numbers if you want to include EE as well.
mathattack 12y ago
I suspect that many non-CS folks go onto CS Phd programs. I have heard that undergrad major at top Indian schools reflecting signaling (certain majors in certain years get the better students, independent of student interest) which is why major isn't a reliable indicator. (Not so much in the US too) Having worked with many folks from IIT, it is a fantastic source of raw intelligence. I view it more similar to CalTech. Coming from a rich family, being a star athlete, or student body leader doesn't help. It's all about the academics.
- 12y ago

cabinpark 12y ago

Analysis of Over 2,000 Computer Science Professors at Top US Universities I was expecting universities from all around the world but this is just the US.