信息检索是一个跨学科领域，它对应于从信息源集合中找到满足信息需求的相关信息单元的过程。数据通常是文本，尽管越来越多地将Web用作数据存储库，从而导致包含诸如图像，视频和声音之类的多媒体数据，其中精确匹配被相似性搜索所取代。检索的主要组成部分是搜索，可以通过在基础数据上添加索引来简化搜索。网络的发展以及智能手机的日益普及以及GPS在这些设备中的嵌入，导致位置作为所有类型的数据的组成部分的重要性日益提高，并且与这些数据结合时被称为空间数据。处理空间数据及其检索的数据库系统被称为地理信息系统（GIS），并且该部
The Computer Science Department's graduate program is ranked among the top in the nation and in the top ten among public universities. Both M.S. and Ph.D degrees are offered, and almost all full-time students receive financial aid in the form of assistantships, fellowships, and grants. The Department has strong research programs in the following areas: artificial intelligence, computer systems and networking, database systems, programming languages, software engineering, scientific computing, algorithms and computation theory, computer vision, geometric computing, graphics, human-computer interaction, and bioinformatics.<br><br>Information Retrieval is an interdisciplinary area which corresponds to the process of finding relevant information units that satisfy an information need from a collection of information sources. The data is usually text although the increasing use of the web as a data repository has led to the inclusion of multimedia data such as images, videos, and sound where exact matches are replaced by similarity searches. The main component of the retrieval is a search which is facilitated by imposing an index on the underlying data. The growth of the web and the increasing popularity of smartphones and the embedding of GPS in these devices has led to the increasing importance of location as a component of all types of data and when coupled with this data is known as spatial data. Database systems that deal with spatial data and its retrieval are known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the department has been in the forefront of dealing with this type of data for over 50 years.