Meet the Head of Department

What does the Computer Science Department do?

Topic wise you can say we’re a classical computer science department but we work in a different way because of the multidisciplinary approach at the IT-University which is ensured by a close connection to the two other departments. Our research in e-voting is a good example on how theoretical cryptography can be combined with the concepts of trust and societal issues.

What are your ambitions for the department?

We want to continue to grow; more research projects and faculty – and we want to expand the education programmes. Furthermore, I want us to keep being attractive for external grant agencies and foundations.

A very specific role for the department is to deliver technical courses to the other five education programmes outside our department.
Furthermore, we will continue to have joint projects with the two other departments, preserving the multi-disciplinarity of the IT University. 

How will you achieve these goals?

There is a huge demand for graduates with strong IT and computer science skills. What we are doing in the Computer Science Department is completely aligned with the needs of society and the wishes of government and industry. By educating more students we meet a societal need, we can increase the number of faculty, and we can do more research..

Researchwise we need to find the right balance between applied and basic research and we should combine them when possible. With the strong emphasis on external funding this balance becomes a challenge due to the declining amount of basic research funding. I think we need to do both because developing applications often requires you to go back to fundamentals and study basic principles.

Biography