The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department spans multiple areas of research including theory, systems, AI/ML, architectures, and software.
CSE’s areas of research are computer hardware, including architecture, VLSI (chip design), FPGAs, and design automation; computer security and privacy; cyber-physical systems; distributed systems; database systems; machine learning and artificial intelligence; natural language processing; networks; pervasive computing and human-computer interaction; programming languages; robotics; social computing; storage systems; and visual computing, including computer vision, visualization, and graphics.
In cooperation with other departments on campus, CSE also offers a strong research group in bioinformatics, computational biology, biomolecular engineering, and human genome mapping. The CSE department enjoys a close relationship with the Electrical and Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics departments. Faculty members carry out joint research projects, supervise students, and teach courses for these departments. The M.S. degree requires either a master’s thesis or an approved project and is usually completed in two years, although it is possible to complete the program in one year. The Ph.D. degree is usually completed in five years.
#1
best information technology bachelor’s degree in California (College Factual, 2026)
#40
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#8
best computer engineering bachelor's degree schools in the far Western US region (College Factual, 2025)
#26
best school for computer engineering graduate degrees (College Factual, 2025)
Explore potential Computer Science and Engineering career paths
- Software Engineer/Developer
- Hardware Engineer/Developer
- Network Engineer
- Web Developer
- Mobile App Developer
- AI/ML Engineer
- UX Designer
- Systems Architect
- Cybersecurity Engineer
Securing the hardware behind complex data infrastructure
AI and other data-intensive computing tasks rely on a massive data center infrastructure. A new Baskin Engineering project aims to improve the security of the hardware powering these complex systems.
CSE research news
UC Santa Cruz hosts AI summit and hackathon events for SF Tech Week
The two events brought together industry leaders, founders, builders, and students.
Mitigating risks in free-flowing AI chatbot conversations
The NSF CAREER Award-funded research will focus on safety in addiction-recovery and teenage mental health scenarios, but can be applied to any chatbot use.
Exploring cybersecurity needs for energy-efficient analog computing
Baskin Engineering hardware security expert Dustin Richmond will study vulnerabilities in compute-in-memory architectures with the support of an NSF CAREER Award.
Many research projects take place at our Silicon Valley Campus
We’re hiring!
Open positions include: lecturer, teaching professor, research professor. Find out more.
Upcoming events
CSE Colloquium: Relational Attention for Data-Efficient Language Modeling
Education in the Age of AI: Faculty Panel and Workshop
NLP at UC Santa Cruz
The UC Santa Cruz Computer Science and Engineering Department offers a professional M.S. degree in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This program offers in-depth coursework in natural language processing, machine learning, and data science.
