Auburn University, founded in 1856, was the first land-grant college in Alabama. It has over 23,000 students, and it is located in the town of Auburn, which is about seven miles from the county seat in Opelika. The Auburn-Opelika-Lee-County community has a population of over 100,000. Auburn is a small, pleasant town located off Interstate I-85, which provides easy access to Montgomery and Atlanta. It lies about 60 miles east of the Montgomery Airport, 100 miles southwest of the Atlanta International Airport, and 120 miles southeast of the Birmingham International Airport. There are frequent direct flights from Atlanta to all major North American and West European cities as well as connections to principal Asian cities.
Auburn University is noted for its excellent engineering, veterinary, and agricultural programs. The Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, which enrolls about one-fifth of the total student body, is heavily committed to research. Research awards during the 2003 fiscal year were over $25,000,000.
The Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) Department currently has over 450 undergraduates, 140 graduate students, and 19 full-time faculty members. It offers bachelor's degrees in both computer science and software engineering, as well as the Master of Science (M.S.), the Master of Software Engineering (M.Sw.E.), and the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.). The students within the department are quite involved professionally, as evidenced by active chapters of ACM, IEEE-CS, and UPE. The faculty is committed to a balanced program in both instruction and research, with the goal of achieving excellence in the following disciplines:
The Computer Science and Software Engineering Department cooperates closely with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Several members of the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty are experts in computer architecture and wireless devices, and they have one of the country's leading university micro-electronics laboratories.
