Boston College will launch a doctoral program in computer science next fall, with a special focus on ethics and harnessing technology to benefit society.
“BC will be equipping these students with the ability to participate in this broader societal conversation about both the benefits and the risks of things like AI and machine learning,” said Sergio Alvarez, an associate professor and the program’s director. “And by doing that, they’re going to be contributing directly to social good.”
Alvarez emphasized that BC’s five-year program will stand out from Ph.D. programs at other universities by prioritizing both the technical aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside the social and ethical issues of their growing use.
“Students in the Ph.D. program will be required to take a course in the social and ethical dimensions of computing,” Alvarez said. “Additionally, in their Ph.D. dissertation, we will require that students have explicit attention to social and ethical dimensions.”
The five-year program will enroll an inaugural cohort of five students next fall, a size selected to match the faculty and resources currently in place. Alvarez said the goal is to expand the program each year, eventually reaching 25 students.
“We hope that within a few years, we will have a fully populated program,” Alvarez said. “I think the presence of graduate students will really inject a considerable amount of energy into all of the research projects that faculty have going, and they’re really going to boost the quality of the output.”
According to Alvarez, the computer science department spent several years laying the groundwork for the program. With the program, Alvarez said he hopes the University can confront the risks associated with AI and other new technologies, as well as a widespread lack of understanding about how they work.
“Regardless of what specific surface form things take in the future, technologically or politically, there will be this undercurrent of ethical behavior and direction that will guide what they do,” Alvarez said. “ I think that will be probably the most permanent of the lessons that they take from BC and from this program.”
George Mohler, Fitzgerald professor and computer science department chair program, said the launch of the program will expand the scope of research the computer science department can pursue.
“The types of projects we’ll be able to tackle will be bigger,” Mohler said. “And that will involve undergraduates working on some piece of it, a graduate student working on another piece, and then the faculty member kind of supervising.”
Computer science is consistently ranked among BC’s most popular majors, with 533 students majoring in it, according to the 2024–25 BC Fact Book.
Mohler said the faculty believes now is the right time to launch the Ph.D. program because it will add teaching assistants and create opportunities for undergraduate students to get involved with research.
“I think that this has been a long time coming,” Mohler said. “So, I’m excited to see what everybody can do with this missing piece filled in, and so I expect to see great things continue to come out of the department in terms of research and teaching once we have a graduate program.”
