So, here are some ideas about numbers.
Our computer science department currently has 21 full professors plus four assistant professors.
Each professor typically has a research group
of typically between two and eight PHD students.
So, in total we have around 100 PHD students
currently.
And we have something like 900 Bachelor students
and 450 Master students.
So, that’s in total, not per year.
Now, when you want judge the research quality
of a department, that is a difficult problem.
A good indicator for an individual researcher’s
impact is the so-called h-Index.
If you look at the h-Index, 10 out of our
full professors have an h-Index of 30 or higher.
There are three that have above 40 and our
top guy just cracked 50.
That is pretty rare in computer science.
Now, another indicator is research funding.
For example, our department is hosting a so-called
collaborative research centre.
This is a pretty competitive, a large research
funding scheme.
It is awarded by Germany’s national science
foundation.
This centre works on on-the-fly computing.
The idea is that dynamic on-demand provisioning
of both software and hardware jointly together.
In total, we manage to pay most of our PHD
students via such external competitive funding.
So, I guess it seems funding agencies like
what we do.
Both from state government funding as well
as from industrial funding perspective.
Only some of our PHD students are paid directly
by the university via teaching assistance.
If you also look at other indicators, we have
a number of prestigious awards in our department.
We have IEEE fellows, we have ERC grand holders,
we have Leibnitz laureates.
So, I guess in total I can state that our
computer science department here at University
of Paderborn is one of the strongest in Germany.
