As the most booming, robust, and influential intellectual field, computer science and its application have become an important cornerstone of a country’s overall competitiveness. The Department of Computer Science and Technology has worked to drive the national innovation strategy, cultivate talents and develop cutting-edge technologies and solutions, advancing the development of science and technology in building a community with a shared future for mankind.
The Tsinghua University Computer Science Advisory Committee, consisting of more than 20 academicians from home and abroad, including five Turing Award winners, highlighted in 2017 that "Tsinghua University has come a long way in building computer science, and has grown into a leading constructor of the discipline among domestic universities and a world-leading computer research and teaching institution." "Tsinghua has made impressive progress in computer science. Its faculty and students in this field have been equipped to undertake top-level research and bear fruits that lead the world," the Committee said in a statement in 2018.
Fostering future talents
In terms of curriculum construction, the department has restructured the teaching contents of the undergraduates’ core curriculum. Tsinghua has realized its teaching goal of independently developing one functional computer, one operating system core and one compiler system based on a unified instruction set, making itself the first Chinese university to set a complete computer system in undergraduate courses.
The department has developed the “Five Star Plan,” where personalized teaching is offered to meet the students' needs of overall quality improvement and personalized development. The Plan has significantly enhanced the teachers' sense of achievement in education and the students' sense of gain in improving their abilities, as well as strengthened the discipline of computer science at Tsinghua to provide all-round and full-time education.
The 2021 Student Award Conference and Zhong Shimo Scholarship Review Meeting
The department works hard to build the all-English "Advanced Computing Master/Doctoral Program,” with nearly 200 students from over 40 countries covered by the 16 all-English courses. It has also established joint training programs with world-class universities to create a whole process and multi-dimensional international training mechanism for students, including:
Tsinghua-CMU dual master's degree program,
Tsinghua-USC dual master's degree program,
Sino-German doctoral training program,
Tsinghua-NUS doctoral training program.
International Summer School
The department has cultivated a group of well-grounded and innovative undergraduates through unremitting exploration and efforts. Its undergraduate supercomputing team has won the most titles in the world: the World University Supercomputing Competition 16 times, and a grand slam of three supercomputing competitions in 2018. Moreover, its all-English “Advanced Computing Program” was recommended by Forbes as one of the best 10 international master’s programs in AI and data science in 2021.
Professor Jack Dongarra, the 2021 Turing Award winner, presents the SC19 Student Supercomputing Competition Award to the Tsinghua Student Supercomputing Team
Article published by Forbes on the department’s computing program
Leading Innovation Hub
The department implements an active, open and effective talent cultivation policy, developing itself as an important talent center and a leading innovation hub in the world.
The department has established a faculty team with international competitiveness that is in line with the needs of the national strategy.
Oriented to future subjects, the department is also devoted to emerging research directions such as quantum computing and brain-inspired AI.
To that end, it works to attract outstanding talents with scientific research strength and teaching philosophy both from home and abroad to join its faculty, while attaching great importance to the continuous capacity enhancement of its faculty members.
Research driven
The department is mission-driven. It has participated in or presided over the construction of many national research institutions and infrastructures, such as the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, and has undertaken several major projects at the national level, attaining numerous research achievements of global significance.
With the optimized allocation of advantageous resources, the department has developed significant research directions, including:
high-performance computer systems,
secure and reliable next-generation Internet,
AI theory and its applications.
The department has pooled its strength and made important research progress. Some notable achievements are:
Won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize twice, the highest-level international award in the field of high-performance computing applications, with the help of China’s 100P supercomputer; proposed the world-leading Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA), which has been commercialized and achieved large-scale application, to enhance the trustworthiness of the source address and tackle related security and technical problems; established the third-generation theoretical framework for safe, robust, and explainable AI and produced abundant scientific results with international significance. In the past five years, the department has won second prize in the National Natural Science Awards and three second prizes in the National Science and Technology Progress Awards.
The project “Development, Key Technology and Mass-Scale Application of Source Address Validation Architecture for the Next-Generation Internet” was awarded the grand prize of the Science and Technology Progress Awards of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the only one for the year 2020.
The 2017 ACM Gordon Bell Prize Award Ceremony
The department has provided an environment and supporting system conducive to the establishment of a world-class computer science discipline. In the Global Forum on the Development of Discipline held in 2018 and 2021, attendees discussed some major issues hindering the development of computer science and made positive contributions to the advancement of the discipline.
The Second Global Forum on Development of Computer Science
Moving forward, the department will further endeavor to usher in a new era for the development of computer science.