The University of Florida Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) is housed within the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. The department was founded in 1972 as the Department of Computer Information Sciences, with Robert “Bob” Ramey as the founding chair of the department.
In its early years, the department was housed on the fifth floor of Weil Hall, with some faculty members housed on the third floor of the stadium. CISE moved into the brand-new Computer Science Engineering (CSE) Building in 1989. The department was renamed shortly after to Computer & Information Science & Engineering.
The first master’s student graduated in 1982 and the first couple of Ph.D.s graduated in 1987. Though Human-Centered Computing (HCC) classes were taught prior to the start of the program, the opportunity to earn a Ph.D. degree in HCC became official in Fall 2016, with its first two graduates in summer of 2017.
On October 23, 2007, the department held its first iteration of the Career Development Workshop with 300 students and 14 companies attending. The goal of the event was to allow students to interact with top industry representatives so students could prepare and develop the skills needed for future career and internship opportunities. Over the years, the event shifted into more of a job fair. In fall 2019, the 25th iteration, the event name was changed to the CISE Career Fair and we saw the largest attendance of students and alumni to date: 1,200 students and 37 companies.
In late 2010, L3Harris (then the Harris Corp.), gave $3 million to create an endowed research fund called the Research Excellence Fund in Computer Science and Engineering. In recognition of this gift, the department named space on the third floor of the CSE Building the Harris Gateway to Learning and Innovation.
In May 2015, Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., the Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor, was named chair of the department.
Today, the department has more than 2,300 students and 52 faculty. The department is home to research in algorithms; bioinformatics; cloud computing; computational geometry; computer vision & medical image computing; concurrency, parallelism, and high-performance computing; database, data science, and informatics; embedded systems; energy-aware computing; graphics and visualization; human-centered computing; image and signal analysis; information security; machine learning; pervasive and mobile computing; and networking.
Learn more about UF’s history.
Department Chairs
2015 -  | Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D. The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor Chair |
2012 - 2015 | Paul D. Gader, Ph.D. Chair |
2011 - 2012 | Gerhard X. Ritter, Ph.D. Acting Chair |
2001 - 2011 | Sartaj K. Sahni, Ph.D. Chair |
1994 - 2001 | Gerhard X. Ritter, Ph.D. Chair |
1988 - 1994 | Stephen S. Yau, Ph.D. Chair |
1986 - 1988 | Randy Y.C. Chow, Ph.D. Acting Chair |
1977 - 1986 | Roger Elliot, Ph.D. Chair |
1976 - 1977 | Robert A. Ramey, Ph.D. Acting Chair |
1974 - 1976 | George Haynam, Ph.D. Chair |
| 1972 - 1974 | Robert A. Ramey, Ph.D. Acting Chair |