October 2001 Jamboree - About the ETH

<home> <program> <registration> <accomodations>
<exhibition> <venue> <about zurich> <about the eth>

The Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, or - to give the university its German acronym - the ETH, was founded by the Swiss goverment in 1854 as a polytechnic and opened its doors in Zurich in 1855. Until 1969 it was the only national university in Switzerland. In its core areas of engineering, natural sciences, architecture, and mathematics it is one of the leading academic research institutions world wide.

Sketch of ETH Buildings The ETH itself comprises 17 departments, 330 professors and about 840 lecturers who fulfill teaching obligations and conduct research. A staff of more than 7'500 - with a 25% proportion of women - work in teaching, research and administration. Current statistics of the ETH show 11'700 registered students. Each year about 1'250 receive an ETH diploma and a further 530 complete a doctoral thesis. Current annual expenditure has reached 1 billion Swiss francs.

The Department of Computer Science at the ETH consists of four Institutes: the Institute of Computer Systems, the Institute of Information Systems, the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, and the Institute for Scientific Computing. Currently, 22 professors, several senior research associates, around 100 research assistants, and the permanent technical and administrative staff form the department's crew of some 130 people.

The Department offers a 9 semesters (i.e., 4.5 years) diploma program in computer science and a PhD program. Currently, about 800 Diploma students and 100 PhD students are registered.

The main current research themes are databases, global information systems, information management, distributed systems, operating systems, software construction, programming languages and their compilers (the programming languages Pascal and Modula have emerged from ETH Zurich), computer graphics, computer vision, computational biochemistry, parallel computing, numerical linear algebra, computational geometry, combinatorial algorithms, algorithmic geometry, information security and cryptography, logic programming, ubiquitous computing.

 

 

 

        The Disappearing Computer Initiative © 2001