Research & Impact
Making an Impact for a Better World
As computing continues to transform our world, the research we're pursuing at Stanford Computer Science seeks to ethically create, shape, and empower the new frontier. From the latest in robotics to foundation models to cryptocurrency, Stanford computer scientists are making an impact on the world beyond our academic walls.
Faculty Spotlight: Omer Reingold, the Rajeev Motwani Professor in Computer Science
"A computer scientist teaching a theater class is a bit unusual, I’ll grant you that. But is it so strange? For me, classifying different parts of campus to left-brain-versus-right-brain kind of thinking is just an unfortunate stereotype. I'd much rather go with ‘creativity is creativity is creativity.'"
Read Omer Reingold's Story
In the News: See Our Research in Action
Best Paper Award: "Breaking the Metric Voting Distortion Barrier"
Stanford professor, Moses Charikar, and his two co-authors, Kangning Wang (postdoc) and Prasanna Ramakrishnan (PhD student), win Best Paper Award at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA24).
Click here to read more as Kangning and Prasanna discuss their passion for research, the challenges they faced, and the significance of this award.
Meet some of the Students Behind Code in Place
Congratulations to students and volunteer teachers from around the world who completed Code in Place! Since 2020, 4,000 section leaders and 40,000 students have enjoyed this free, virtual, global program - and the 2025 cohort has joined their ranks. Developed by Chris Piech, Mehran Sahami, and their colleagues in just 2 weeks after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this six-week course offers the content from the first half of Stanford's flagship course CS106A.
In this video series, take a behind the scenes look at the student contributions and care that went into creating a platform that helps people worldwide become better programmers.
Chapter One: The origin story | The IDE | Tailored error messages | Small group peer learning
Chapter Two: Teach Now | Using chatbots for outcomes | Style feedback
Chapter Three: Assessment via Teaching
CS Faculty & Their Research
Explore our network of faculty members and the innovation conceived by their research. They are shaping a new era of solutions and the next generation of thought leaders and entrepreneurs.
Meet Our Faculty & Their Research
Stanford Computer Science faculty members work on the world's most pressing problems, in conjunction with other leaders across multiple fields. Fueled by academic and industry cross-collaborations, they form a network and culture of innovation.
Explore our directory of faculty by their research areasThe Emmy Award-winning video looks back at a remarkable six decades of AI work at Stanford University.
Stanford has been a leader in AI almost since the day the term was dreamed up by John McCarthy in the 1950s. McCarthy would join the Stanford faculty in 1962 and found the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), initiating a six-decades-plus legacy of innovation. Over the years, the field has grown to welcome a diversity of researchers and areas of exploration, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostics, natural language processing, and more. All the while, Stanford has been at the forefront in research and in educating the next generation of innovators in AI. Artificial intelligence would not be what it is today without Stanford.
Research at the Affiliate Programs
Stanford Computer Science has a legacy of working with industry to advance real-world solutions. Membership in our affiliate programs provides companies with access to the research, faculty, and students to accelerate their innovations.
Research in the Affiliate Programs
Join the Affiliates Programs
Interested in the benefits of memberships to our affiliate programs, sponsored research, executive education programs, or student recruitment? Get started by contacting: affiliates@cs.stanford.edu
Connecting Students & Research: Jump In
At Stanford, students do amazing research. Their projects are widely recognized as some of the best in the world. Stanford's reputation as one of the top CS programs comes in large part from this. If you're a student with a passion for participating in meaningful research, our CURIS and LINXS summer research programs are designed to get you started.
CURIS Program
CURIS is the undergraduate research program of Stanford's Computer Science Department. Each summer, 100+ undergraduates conduct and participate in computer science research advised and mentored by faculty and PhD students.
Details about CURISRecipients of the Arthur Samuel PhD Best Thesis Award
The Arthur Samuel PhD Best Thesis Award is a recognition given for outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer science. Named after Arthur Samuel, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, this award promotes excellence in research and encourages the development of innovative ideas and solutions.
2019 | William Hamilton
Advisor: Dan Jurafsky
Dissertation: Representation Learning Methods for Computational Social Science
2020 | Danqi Chen
Advisor: Chris Manning
Dissertation: Neural Reading Comprehension and Beyond
2021 | Zhihao Jia
Advisor: Alex Aiken, Co-Advisor: Matei Zaharia
Dissertation: Automated Discovery of Machine Learning Optimizations
2022 | Aditi Raghunathan
Advisor: Percy Liang
Dissertation: Adversarially Robust Machine Learning with Guarantees
2023 | Kevin Tian
Advisor: Aaron Sidford
Dissertation: Iterative Methods for Structured Algorithmic Data Science
2024 | Mitchell Gordon
Advisor: Michael Bernstein, Co-Advisor: James Landay
Dissertation: Human-AI Interaction Under Societal Disagreement
2025 | Eric Mitchell
Advisor: Chelsea Finn, Co-Advisor: Chris Manning
Dissertation: From Pre-trained Language Models to Useful AI Systems
