US News & World Report’s periodic rankings of graduate programs in
computer science will be officially released tomorrow. We did well :-)

Now, before I go on, let me be clear that reputation rankings like these are
inherently imperfect, biased, trailing metrics of quality and impact (see
the Graham-Diamond report for more discussion here). They’re definitely not
a meaningful goal in and of themselves. That said, it is comforting that
others recognize what we already know — UCSD CSE is a top program that is
on a singularly rapid rise.

Here are the numbers: the overall CS program is now ranked 13th. All four
computer science specialties that US News covered are ranked in the top 20
(AI: 19th, PL: 17th, Theory: 14th and Systems: 9th).
Genomics/Genetics/Bioinformatics is ranked 6th (technically its listed as a
subspecialty of Biology, but on this campus we’ll claim at least some of the
credit) and Computer Engineering is ranked 17th.

For those of you who are new or don’t track this stuff, let me try to
provide some context to appreciate these numbers. Reputation rankings have
been widely studied and are known to change quite slowly — reputation has
tremendous social momentum. However, UCSD has consistently been the
exception to the rule in computer science. In 1994, US News first started
ranking CS programs and UCSD was ranked 30th. By the time I joined UCSD in
2000 we were ranked 25th (FWIW, my prediction at the time is that we’d be
recognized as a top 10 dept within 10 years… and I still believe that).
In 2002, we rose to 20th and, as of tomorrow, we’re ranked 13th. Not only
is our change since 2002 the largest improvement of any CS dept in top 30,
but our overall rise of 17 positions over the last 12 years is
unprecedented and unmatched. In fact, no one else is even _close_ (you need
to add the improvements of multiple departments to match ours, 90% changed
less than 3 positions).

In the end, all of this is just a reflection on what we’ve done. However,
it’s a reflection that all of you are a part of and should be proud of –
including the staff who make the department run, the students whose ideas,
proofs, measurements, algorithms, systems, and simulations are what we’re
known for, and finally the faculty who write e-mails, shuffle papers, and
provide critical funding for the coffee cart. Seriously, thanks everyone
and keep it up!

Basically you register to run 5Km, and the money raised goes to fund undergrad scholarships at UCSD. And for every person that beats [[http://ucop.edu/ | UC President]] Robert C. Dynes, the current [[http://www-chancellor.ucsd.edu/ | UCSD Chanellor]] Mary Anne Fox will shell out of //her own// pocket $25! How cool is that?

Of course, before the race started, I thought it was a lame decision — I mean come on, this guy (the UC president) is probably in his 50s, and there were like 2000 people at the race — wouldn’t like a HUGE number of people beat him? As it turns out, I was wrong. By an order of magnitude. Robert C. Dynes made it to the finish line in just **about 23 minutes**. Thats almost 6 minutes less than me!!

I was frikking embarassed. Talk about being out of shape (well, as Mamu says round is also a shape…). But it was an amazing experience. The weather was awesome, and there were so many people — men, women, boys and girls, children and seniors — the whole environment was buzzing with enthusiasm. I loved it, and hope to not do any worse next year :)

The pamphlets said something about a large number of day time activities and a grand musical finale in the evening. What it turned out to be was a huge crowd of drunk undergrads prowling all over campus doing all kinds of silly stuff (jumping on trampoulines, riding mini bikes, bouncy rides, rope walking and anything else you can think of).

So the day time activities were more or less a disappointment — I mean they were not bad, but they were not organized. If you wanted to have fun, you’d have to be drunk. I was also curious about the musical concert, coz I’ve never attended a concert at UCSD before. People were quite excited about the bands going to be performing. Of course, I hadn’t heard any of their names before coz I don’t have that much history here yet. Busta Rhymes and Goldfinger were among the prominent ones.

Sadly though, when we reached the grounds, the stage was set (HUGE), the first band was just starting to play… BUT, there were only like twenty UCSD students in all there!! I’m convinced that UCSD is a big geeky school now :-D

Anyways, so after that we decided to ditch the concert and go watch Shrek 2 instead. Well to be fair, on our way back we saw quite a crowd headed towards the concert, so I guess we just reached a bit too early and left even earlier! But Shrek 2 was AWESOME and more than made up for the day. It was funny, and it was quite short — I mean I was expecting that the story would build up now now now… and it just got over.

I don’t know if thats good or bad, but the movie was fun. The new characted, Puss in the boots, is a cat with an attitude, and the voice over by Antonio Banderas is really good. Definitely worth a watch, or even twice! :)