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Why CS at AU?

The Department of Computer Science at American University balances the practical and theoretical aspects of computer science and provides students with a background for professional employment or further study in the discipline.

Computer Science at AU

Students whirring through DMTI.

The Department of Computer Science at American University balances the practical and theoretical aspects of computer science and provides students with a background for professional employment or further study in the discipline. Our graduates move on to a wide range of careers that includes software development and design, multimedia computing, artificial intelligence and computer vision, and other technical computing professions.

As a student in our department, you will:

  • Master state-of-the-art technologies necessary to keep pace with this rapidly changing field.
  • Receive individual attention in classes with fewer than 20 students.
  • Conduct research and complete independent studies with faculty members actively researching a variety of fields, including: artificial intelligence, scientific computing, databases and knowledge discovery, computer architecture, computational geometry, and computer vision.
  • Obtain internships and utilize resources at the various high-tech companies and government agencies in the Washington, DC area, including: IBM, Mellon Bank, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a variety of nonprofit organizations and start-up companies

Bulletins

Nathalie Japkowicz won the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association.

Congrats to our award-winning Computer Science majors! Henry Gray '26 and Noah McNamee '29 won awards at the Mathias Student Research Conference, and Megan Williams '26 won AU's Kinsman-Hurst Award.

Nathalie Japkowicz with AU collaborators Jeff Gill and Wendy Melillo wrote Uncovering coded antisemitism online takes both human expertise and AI automation (May 2026).

Bei Xiao co-organized AU's 2026 AI Research Conference with the Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence.

Roberto Corizzo won an outstanding poster award at the 2025 International Conference on Data Mining, for a new state-of-the art anomaly detection method.

Leah Ding received a $867,000 National Science Foundation grant to develop innovative AI and machine learning algorithms that can detect and forecast wildfires, and a $100,602 grant from NASA for“Pix4DCloud: A Suite of Physics-Constrained Transformer Models to Retrieve 4D Clouds in Real World and Digital Twins.” 

More CS News

Worktables in the DABL

Labs and Research

The department hosts and works with many labs on campus including the Design and Build Lab, Game Lab, and the Center for Innovation.

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Aerial view of in-progress LEGO Cathedral

AU Student Creates Video Game for World’s Largest LEGO Cathedral

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Students Maya Kinley-Hanlon, David Bialy, and Jacob Vancampen with Philip Johnson in AU’s gravitational wave detector lab.

Student Opportunities

CS students participate in a variety of clubs, organizations, competitions, conferences, internships, and scholarship programs.

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