computer science (thing)

Interesting subfields of computer science:

• Programming languages/compilers.
• Operating systems/systems research.
• Computer architecture/computer engineering. Closely tied to electrical engineering.
• Artificial Intelligence, AKA AI.
• Expert systems. People who deal with expert systems often consider them to be AI, but that's just silly.
• Logic programming, often related to expert systems.
• Symbolic algebraic manipulation: using computational algorithms to solve mathematical problems.
• Automated theorem proving. See the note under Expert systems, above.
• Databases.
• Human-Computer Interaction, often abbreviated HCI.
• Graph theory. Depending on what kind of graph theory you study, it could also be considered a part of pure mathematics or applied combinatorics.
• Operations research is another field on the fuzzy border between mathematics (in particular, combinatorics) and computer science.
• Software engineering, which many computer scientists, and even more hackers, consider to be management voodoo.
• Distributed systems, including parallel processing, distributed computing, and parallel distributed processing (PDP, especially known for neural networks).
• Theoretical computer science, including logic and mathematics of computing.
• Information theory is a very interesting part of theoretical CS,though it also has applications in physics and other fields outside of CS.
• Cryptography/cryptology, like graph theory and many other disciplines, is as much mathematics as it is computer science.
• Computer security, more of an applied field than cryptography.
• etc.

Well-known and highly-regarded computer science schools (in no particular order):

• In North America (US unless otherwise specified):
  • Stanford.
  • Massachvsetts Institvte of Technology.
  • University of California, Berkeley.
  • Cal Tech.
  • CMU.
  • UIUC.
  • Cornell.
  • Princeton.
  • WPI.
  • University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
  • University of Washington.
  • University of Texas, Austin.
  • University of Wisconsin, Madison.
  • University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Brown.
  • Georgia Tech.
  • RPI.
  • Johns Hopkins.
  • Washington University, St. Louis.
• In Europe:
  • UMIST, in the United Kingdom.
  • University of Cambridge, in the UK.
  • Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TUE), in the Netherlands.

If I left out your favourite field of study or your alma mater, please /msg me. I am especially looking for non-US CS schools.

Until now, this writeup has never included the word metanode in its text or title :)