PhD Program

C2 doctoral education is carried on within the Computer Science department.  C2 faculty advise doctoral research in a variety of topics within computing and the arts.  We seek students with strong computer science preparation and interest in the arts.  Students may or may not be artists themselves.  Our purpose of the program is not to train students who want careers in the arts, but computer scientists for whom the arts play an important role in their lives as a whole.

Our education and training strategy builds on a successful existing core curriculum in place for first and second year computer science students, with a set of courses tailored for the students in computing and the arts.  The existing pattern of projects that transition students to full time research will also be followed, with projects and mentoring focused on the arts.  In addition to course work, students will receive training as teaching assistants in courses aimed at computing and the arts associated students and as interns in industry, government laboratories or at academic institutions outside of the US.

The Computer Science core PhD curriculum is flexible in the general plan, with 8 non-project courses required distributed across theory, systems and applications.  Specific arts related courses will be included in C2 students’ program of study.  Course work will further be enriched by events such as the C2 Distinguished speaker series.  In addition to the 8 non-project courses, the existing program in computer science is designed to transition students from advanced coursework to full-time research by working on a one-year research project designated CPSC 690/691.  For C2 students these will all be arts-motivated projects.  Students will identify the fundamental computer science issues revealed in their projects, which will form the basis for formulating their dissertation prospectus in their third year.  For each fundamental issue, the students will also identify arts-related applications that would use their research results.

Students will serve as teaching fellows and will potentially complete internships.  Students will primarily be assigned as teaching fellows for the courses for non-technical majors to increase their interaction with the broader C2 community.  Doctoral students will also be encouraged to spend at least one summer at an internship in industry or at an institution outside of the US.

Internally, student progress would be evaluated by project critiques by computing and the arts faculty.  In their third and fourth years, the students would be required to give oral presentations of their work to the computer science faculty as a whole, as well as computing and the arts faculty, for evaluation and feedback.  We will obtain both formal and informal feedback on student performance from their mentors in their internships.  Assessment of teaching fellow performance will be obtained in part by student mid-year and end-of-year evaluations as well as faculty feedback.

Examples of research topics that may be pursued are described here.  The general requirements of the Yale PhD in Computer Science are listed here.