Department of Computer Science and Information Systems BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

The Department of Computer Science was established in the year 1971 and is one of the earliest Computer Science & Engineering departments in the country. Currently, it has 28 faculty members and over 1300 students working towards their Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees. In addition, it actively participates in select off-campus programmes. The department attracts high quality students from all over India and has an impressive placement record. Many of graduates choose to join some of the best institutions of higher learning around the world, whereas some prefer to gain a few years of work experience before deciding their next course of action. Still some others choose to chase their dream taking a path that is less travelled like taking the social welfare route or liberal arts based vocations. One of the strengths of the department is its strong entrepreneurial culture and many students have successfully involved themselves in creating entrepreneurial ventures some of which have gone fully commercial within a short span of time. While some such students benefit from the on-campus Technology Business Incubator provided by the Institute, some others choose to create virtual organizations to keep the costs low and later move onto the regular business models. In the recent past, we had benchmarked our curriculum with select institutions of higher learning around the world and currently we are carefully reviewing the impact of these consequent changes with a view to make our programmes even more strong and competitive. In the past, the department has attracted unrestricted research grants as well as competitive research grants from several sources including national funding agencies (DST, DEITY-MCIT, DEC, UGC, ATB and CAIR), International funding agencies (European Commission, MFA-Government of France) as well as from corporate research laboratories (Microsoft Research (Redmond), Microsoft Research (India), IBM, CISCO, TCS, Digital Think amongst others).