College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Our goal is to develop and maintain a mutually beneficial alliance between our department and local, regional, and national organizations. Such an alliance will provide our students with the opportunity to experience the demands and excitement of solving real-world problems. Organizations can benefit from faculty expertise, actively engage in technology transfer, and recruit from some of our most talented students. Our faculty can benefit from discourse and feedback from industry leaders, which we find crucial in improving and refining our overall academic program, course contents and teaching methods.

The Department of Computer and Information Sciences has offered an internship program since 1994 to students with junior and senior standing. Informatics students can enroll in INFO-I 420 course for up to 3 internship credits per semester and work in a supervised position at an approved organization. Students could use upto 3 credits towards their Informatics elective requirement. The requirements for a typical 3 credit internship can be satisfied by working for a minimum of 15 hours per week for a period of approximately 4 months (one semester). During this period the intern is jointly evaluated by his or her supervisor at work and the internship faculty supervisor at IU South Bend.

We have around 50 INFO majors and 200 CS majors in our programs, and many juniors and seniors who are eligible for internship. The majority of our students come from Michiana and have strong ties to the area. Our student body ranges from traditional (18-25 years old) to the non-traditional (25-45 years old) to professionals who are returning to the University to enhance their skills. Read Award Winners and Scholarship Recipients Profile and Interviews and Hear what our students have to say!

The Department of Computer and Information Sciences and Informatics programs have twelve tenured full-time faculty members with terminal degrees, a lecturer, and a number of associate faculty. Additional information about the faculty and their research interests and teaching can be found in their profiles in this page. For a quick list of faculty research interests please visit this page.

The Department offers Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Informatics (since 2000s), Online B.S. in Informatics (since 2017), minors in Informatics and Cognitive Science, and a Postbaccalaureate Certificate in Applied Informatics. The department also offers B.S. degree in Computer Science (since mid 1980s), minors in Computer Science, Computer Applications, and undergraduate certificates in Computer Programming, Advanced Computer Programming, and Computer Applications. COIS also offers a graduate certificate in Technology Administration. In collaboration with other departments and programs the COIS offers a Master of Science (M.S.) in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (since 2000s) with focus areas in Computer Science and Data Science. A complete description of these programs can be found on this page or download the department brochure

Informatics Curriculum:

The B.S. in Informatics is offered since 2001 with the first degree awarded in 2004. The degree curriculum follows the guidelines set out by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ABET/CAC, and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the leading professional computing societies. The degree prepares students to enter challenging computing careers in the workplace or to embark on postgraduate programs in informatics.Students in this degree program complete a core curriculum that builds an overall understanding of computers, computational thinking, computing environments, and development and maintenance of computer applications. In addition, each student must take a number of cognate courses which help them specialize in areas such as Business, Social Informatics, Health Informatics, New Media Arts, Web Development, etc.

Every Informatics student is required to take the following core courses:

• INFO-I 101 Introduction to Informatics
• INFO-I 201 Mathematical Foundations of Informatics
• INFO-I 202 Social Informatics
• INFO-I 210 Information Infrastructure I (C++)
• INFO-I 211 Information Infrastructure II (C++)
• INFO-I 308 Information Representation
• INFO-I 450 Design of an Information System
• INFO-I 451 Development of an Information System

In addition to the above core courses, each student is required to choose two Informatics core courses from the following four courses.

• INFO-I 300 Human-Computer Interaction Design and Programming
• INFO-I 303 Organizational Informatics
• INFO-I 310 Multimedia Arts and Technology
• INFO-I 320 Distributed Systems and Collaborative Computing

Every informatics student is required to take the following Mathematics courses:

• M118 Finite Mathematics
• M300-Level Statistics

In addition to the above core courses, each student is required to choose two informatics electives. Some of the current electives are below

• INFO-I 400 Topics in Informatics
• INFO-I 421 Applications of Data Mining
• INFO-I 420 Internship in Informatics Professional Practice
• INFO-I 499 Readings and Research in Informatics
• CSCI-B 424 Parallel and Distributed Programming
• CSCI-B 438 Fundamentals of Computer Networks
• CSCI-B 451 Security in Computing
• CSCI-C 463 Artificial Intelligence I
• CSCI-C 481 Interactive Computer Graphics
• CSCI-C 490 Seminar in Computer Science (choose topics such as Applied Data Mining, Game programming, Computer Vision, Mobile App Development, Embedded Systems, Design Patterns, Web Programming, Advanced Java, Introduction to C#, and Applied Deep Learning.)
• INFO-I 213 Web Site Design and Development
• CSCI-A 340 Web Programming

Our students are exposed to various hardware and operating systems: The department operates a number of laboratories with Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems. The majority of the above facilities are also accessible remotely to students with home computers.

Interested in partnering or have questions?

If you are interested in hiring our students, please contact the Department Chair or the Internship Coordinator by visiting this page.