Computers are not all that new. Cornell’s Department of Computer Science goes back 50 years.

The department will celebrate its golden anniversary with a series of events beginning with a reception the evening of Sept. 30 for some 150 former students who are expected to return to campus. The following day and a half will be devoted to a symposium in G10 Biotech, featuring speakers who are Cornell CS alumni now in faculty and industry positions across the nation, along with current and former Cornell faculty members. Attendance is limited to CS faculty and alumni.

The symposium will pause for a ceremony dedicating Gates Hall, with Bill Gates in attendance, followed by an open house at the new building that has become the home of the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science.

“Fifty is really quite young for a department at a university like Cornell, and it’s young enough for our earliest faculty to still be playing an active role,” said CS department chair Fred Schneider ’75, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science, who joined the CS faculty in 1978.

The department opened its doors in 1965 with five faculty members. Today there are 45 core faculty members, some working in New York City at Cornell Tech. The department is consistently ranked in the top five in the nation. Many of its Ph.D. graduates have gone on to hold faculty positions at other schools, some even chairing their own departments.

After a welcome by Haym Hirsh, dean of Computing and Information Science, the symposium will open with a panel of Turing laureates – three scholars who have received the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in computer science: Edmund M. Clarke, Ph.D. ’76, the FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University; John Hopcroft, the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science; and Juris Hartmanis, the Walter R. Read Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Emeritus and founding chair of the department.

Following will be a contemporary view from Rohan Murty ’05, a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows now working at Infosys Ltd. in Bangalore, India.

Sessions over the two days will include panels on social networks, computer graphics and programming languages – areas in which Cornell has particular strengths. Other speakers are expected to discuss privacy, robotics, Google search and quantum computing.

The evening of Oct. 1 will be devoted to a reception and anniversary banquet in Statler Hall.