Degree Requirements

A minimum of 72 graduate credits is required beyond a bachelor's degree. A master's degree in a related field is considered equivalent to 30 credits. The remaining 42 credits beyond the master’s degree consist of 18 credits of coursework and 24 credits of dissertation. All courses must be approved by the student's advisor. In addition to meeting the course requirement, a doctoral student must pass the Candidacy Examination, complete the dissertation under the supervision of the student's advisor and dissertation committee and pass the oral dissertation examination. In addition, a written dissertation proposal must be accepted by the dissertation committee at least six months prior to the oral dissertation examination. A doctoral candidate is expected to have at least one research paper published or accepted for publication in a fully refereed conference or journal prior to graduation. The following rules apply to the courses taken beyond the master's degree:

  1. Of the 18-credit minimum of coursework, a minimum of 12 credits must be in Computer Science and Engineering courses (excluding directed independent study credits) and a minimum of 9 credits of 6000-level courses must be completed.
  2. A maximum of 3 credits of directed independent study or advanced research may be used to satisfy the minimum of 18 credits. In that case, the subject matter may not overlap the student's dissertation.
  3. Students must register for a minimum of 24 credits of dissertation.
  4. Students must have a GPA of 3.0 (out of 4.0 maximum) or better.
  5. All courses in the degree programs must be completed with a grade of "C" or better.

Students pursuing the Professional Ph.D. in CS with Data Science and Analytics (DSA) concentration must satisfy the following additional requirements:

  1. Graduate coursework counted for the Ph.D. program must contain at least four DSA graduate courses. Additional courses may be approved by the dissertation advisor. Graduate courses completed during the master's degree program may also be used to meet this requirement.

        DSA courses include:
        CAP 6673        Data Mining and Machine Learning
        CAP 5768        Introduction to Data Science
        CAP 6619        Deep Learning
        CAP 6635        Artificial Intelligence
        CAP 6776        Information Retrieval

     2.The student's Ph.D. dissertation research and scholarship must have a strong emphasis on one or more areas of data science and analytics, including but not limited to applied and/or theoretical areas.