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
Peter Sestoft holds an MSc 1988 and PhD 1991 in computer science from Copenhagen University. He is professor and head of Computer Science Department at the IT University and has previously been on the faculty of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (KVL, now part of Copenhagen University).
At the IT University he was the co-designer and the first head of the Software Development BSc program. His interests include programming language design and implementation, and functional, object-oriented and parallel programming. He is the author or co-author of six books at international academic publishers.