Computer Science

The program is individualized to meet each student's needs and provides a firm foundation for continuing on to the doctorate or a professional career. The program accommodates both full-time and part-time students and the program’s main concentrations are virtual reality and intelligent systems and cybersecurity.

The minimum credit hours required for the Ph.D. degree is 60 semester hours beyond the master’s degree. This includes a minimum of 30 semester hours for the dissertation and a minimum of 30 semester hours of 500/600-level coursework.

Visit the Catalog to view additional details about the applied mathematics graduate program, including degree requirements and course descriptions.

Although the faculty research areas covers many fields in computer science, from database to graph algorithms, the program’s main concentrations are virtual reality and intelligent systems and cybersecurity.

The virtual reality and intelligent systems research group has a vision of founding artificial intelligence solutions using “big data” and multimodal data for computer-simulated sensing systems and cognitive, semantic and knowledge-empowered applications (i.e., artificial bots) that interact, converse, make decisions, discover emerging knowledge and explore upcoming challenges in various virtual scenarios and domains.

The cybersecurity research group has a vision to develop systems that operate correctly, securely and efficiently in a hostile environment. Their goal: innovative, robust and trustworthy security solutions for emerging and future systems. Their expertise includes autonomous and cyber-physical systems, cyber resilience and trusted systems, wired and wireless networks and side-channel analysis.

The faculty also is conducting research in autonomous systems, spanning technical domains including but not limited to computer science, mathematics, social sciences and the humanities. Planned research includes formal and mathematical analysis on the safety properties of autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and controlled aircraft systems. The need for research into legal, ethical and regulatory implications opens the opportunity for multidisciplinary collaboration across the College and the University.

The student seeking admission should have a master’s degree from an accredited institution of higher education in mathematics, engineering or one of the sciences to be considered for admission to the Ph.D. program. A master’s degree in computer science or a closely related field is desirable.

Applicants are expected to have a substantial background in undergraduate computer science courses covering programming, data structures, algorithms, computer organization, theory of computing and operating systems; they also should have coursework in discrete mathematics, calculus and linear algebra. Normally, a graduate-level GPA of at least 3.4/4.0 is required.

Graduate credit from other accredited institutions of graduate learning will be reviewed by the graduate committees. Transfer of such credit may be accepted up to a maximum of six semester hours.

• Autonomous Systems and Data Science (Graduate Certificate)

Rooted in our Catholic, Marianist traditions, the University of Dayton is dedicated to being transparent and ensuring student success.

Financial aid may be available for degree-seeking graduate students, file the FAFSA to be considered. Once you have applied and been accepted to a graduate program, we will prepare your applicable aid for the upcoming year.