Today, computers can be found everywhere - in schools, in the workplace, and in homes-doing everything, from the mundane, such as spreadsheets and word processing, to the glitzy and glamorous, such as Web browsers, video games, and virtual reality environments. What computers are used for, who uses them, and when, has changed dramatically in recent years.

At Northwestern University, we are redefining computer science to address the challenges posed by the new demands of ubiquitous computing. Our graduate students and research faculty are inventing and implementing new:

• computer and network hardware and software systems to support very large distributed multimedia networked databases;
• models of tasks, activities, and information flow to support the creation of new modes of human-computer interaction;
• models of intelligence, both human and machine, to support autonomous computational agents (robots and softbots) and
• intelligent adaptive interfaces;
• theories of computation and cognition to support the design and analysis of complex interactive systems;
• algorithms and data structures to support large-scale computation and visualization.