Educational and Scientific Achievements
The first comprehensive computer science curriculum in Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) was introduced at the Faculty in 1973. The department, established in 1974, continues to be responsible for organizing the major part of the undergraduate and graduate computer science education to this date. The distinguishing feature of the curriculum has been a balanced coverage of the mathematical foundations, theoretical computer science, and practical computer science. The part of the curriculum covered by the department at present includes courses on computer architecture, system software, networks, databases, software design, design and analysis of algorithms, formal languages, computational complexity, discrete mathematics, cryptology, data security and others.
The quality of the computer science education has been repeatedly testified by publications of our best students and by high ranking of our student team in the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest Finals. Inclusion of the more abstract, foundational courses proved to be the key factor in educating flexible professionals who have been well received and successful in industry, commerce, research, and education. Most typically they serve as system and/or network administrators, software engineers and programmers. More recently, our graduates have been successful in newly established software firms, both as managers and programmers. Several well-known theoretical computer scientists (Juraj Hromkovič, Róbert Szelepcsényi, Viliam Geffert, etc.) are graduates or obtained their degrees at the Department.
The department succeeded several times in project applications within the TEMPUS Programme of the EU. The projects CIPRO and „Neumann Network“ helped to build the departmental hardware infrastructure and to establish the expertise in Unix workstation technology, networking, and structured document processing. The CUSTU PARLAB parallel computing laboratory run jointly with the Department of Informatics of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics of the Slovak Technical University also resulted from one of these projects. Furthermore, the department participated in project LEARN-ED under the COPERNICUS Programme and built a multimedia laboratory.
The department has been involved in the organization of one of the top European conferences in theoretical computer science ? MFCS ? each time it took place in Slovakia. Further conferences recently organized or co-organized by the department include SOFSEM '98 and DISC '99. Besides, the department houses the secretariat of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, of the Slovak Society for Computer Science and of the Association for Security of Information Technologies (ASIT).
Read more about this topic: Department Of Computer Science, FMPI, Comenius University
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