The following are the subject exams currently available in each of the main areas of Computer Science. Passing one of the subject exams in one of the research areas is necessary to satisfy the depth requirement of the PhD qualification. Please contact one of the faculty in your area of interest for more details.
The form of qualifying exam depends on the subject area, and is set by the relevant group of faculty members (see below). The exam committee typically consists of at least 3 faculty members in the subject area, chosen at the discretion of the student’s advisor. Note that later in the graduation process, a thesis defense committee will be assigned and must meet certain constraints set by GRS (see the GRS PhD Degree Requirements and CAS’s Final Oral Exam and Dissertation Draft); it is advisable for these committees to be similar.
Algorithms and Theory Area
- Algorithms and Theory Subject Exam (Faculty: Bun, Ene, Homer, Raskhodnikova, and Smith)
Systems Area
- Networking Subject Exam (Faculty: Bestavros, Byers, Crovella, Matta)
- Operating Systems Subject Exam (Faculty: West, Appavoo, Krieger, Mancuso)
Software Area
- Programming Language Subject Exam (Faculty: Kfoury, Xi, Stoughton, Gaboardi)
Other Areas
- AI (Faculty: Gong, Ghadiyaram, Sclaroff, Saenko, Plummer, Mueller)
- Graphics (Faculty: Chien, Whiting)
- Cryptography & Security (Faculty: Canetti, Reyzin, Smith, Tromer, Varia)
- Data Mining & Data Management (Faculty: Athanassoulis, Kollios, Terzi, Tsourakakis)
For more information, and for details regarding how the subject exam fits in the bigger picture of completing a PhD degree, you may want to check the various PhD degree milestones.