Overview
With a student enrollment of 24,500, the University at Buffalo is the largest of the four University Centers of the State University of New York. It offers comprehensive study in the arts and sciences and in the schools of engineering, management, law, medicine, dentistry, and health-related professions.

There are 215 full-time graduate students in the department. Most students are recent graduates, but some acquired professional experience before returning to graduate school.

Recent Ph.D. employment is evenly divided between academics and industry. Many hold tenure-track, teaching, or postdoctoral positions in American universities, and others are research scientists, software engineers, and senior programmer/analysts at companies that include Xerox, AT&T Bell Labs, Hewlett-Packard, and Disney.

The Location and Community
The University is located in western New York State, just outside Buffalo and near Niagara Falls. The area's recreational activities include swimming, boating, and fishing on the Great Lakes in summer and skiing and sledding in winter. Hiking and camping are available in nearby parks. Buffalo is home to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and an active theater district. Many professional sports teams are based in Buffalo, including the Bills (football), Sabres (hockey), and Bisons (baseball). Toronto is an easy drive north.

Programs of Study and Degree Requirements
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Buffalo offers programs of study leading to the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science. Courses cover a wide range of interests, with particular emphasis on the areas of algorithms and theory, computer networks and distributed systems, computer security and information assurance, computer vision and information visualization, databases and data mining, high-performance computing and computational science, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, multiagent systems and e-commerce technology, multimedia databases and information retrieval, pattern recognition and machine learning, programming languages and software systems, and VLSI and computer architecture.

Doctoral students are required to qualify in each of four general areas and submit a dissertation that describes original independent research. The Ph.D. is awarded in recognition of high achievement in research, and the program is intended for persons interested in research careers.

For the M.S. degree, students must complete at least 30 credits of course work. These 30 credits must include either a thesis (usually 6 credits) or a project (usually 3 credits).

Facilities & Resources
The department's research facilities include more than 100 Sun Workstations as well as X-terminals and SPARCserver systems, including three Ultra60 and two ultra2 file servers, totaling 800 gigabytes of disk space. The department has two Sun Enterprise 450s and two Ultra 80s functioning as computer servers, along with an Enterprise 450 Oracle server. Windows NT machines and laser printers are readily available. The department also has SGI Onyx and SGI Octave machines. The department also has access to computing facilities provided by the University and Science and Engineering Node Services (SENS), including a Sun time-sharing system and workstations. Also associated with the department is the Center for Computational Research, a supercomputing center, with its SGI Origin 2000 and IBM SP2. The department's systems are connected to the University backbone by a 100-Mbps Ethernet port directly on a gigabit router. The department's internal networking is a mix of 100BaseT, switched 100BaseT, and gigabit Ethernet. Through NYSERNet, the University has an FDDI link to a SprintNet T3 connection to the Internet and to Internet2. Dial-up access, including PPP, is available.

Expenses and Aid
For 2006-07, tuition for full-time study (12 or more credits) was $8916 per academic year for international and out-of-state students. Fees, including health insurance, are mandatory and are $1713 for students not granted scholarships and $1428 for those on scholarship. New York State resident tuition is lower. For supported students, a schedule of 9 credits is considered full-time.

Financial Aid:
A variety of assistantships and fellowships are available to qualified graduate students, with stipends of $14,250 plus tuition scholarships for the full amount of academic year tuition, up to $8416 for 2006-07. In exceptional cases, additional funding of $4000 is awarded. Teaching assistants are assigned part-time duties in the instructional program or in support of departmental laboratories. Research assistants are supported part-time on faculty-supervised research projects.

Housing/Living Expenses:
Graduate students live off campus or in University housing. In 2006-07, rooms in the residence halls cost $4628 for a single and $3842 for a double per academic year, plus approximately $2400 per year for board. New apartment-style on-campus housing is approximately $500 to $600 per month. For more information, students should visit the University's housing Web site at http://www.ub-housing.buffalo.edu/rates.shtml.

How to Apply
Applications for the fall semester should be submitted by December 15. For further information and to apply, prospective students should visit the department's Web site at the address below and follow the link for prospective students.

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