The following is a guest blog post from Craig E. Wills,  Professor and Department Head of the Computer Science Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. 

The wealth of faculty searches in Computer Science during this hiring season for positions starting in the Fall of 2015 affords the opportunity to study areas of Computer Science where departments are choosing to invest in new faculty hires. While the number and areas for faculty searches does not necessarily translate into the same for faculty hires, we believe that they provide insight into current and future needs within the discipline. We analyzed ads from 223 institutions for hundreds of tenure-track faculty positions in Computer Science. Overall, the clusters of Big Data, Security and Systems/Networking are the areas of greatest investment.

From a research perspective, the 122 institutions in our study granting PhDs in Computer Science are twice as likely to be seeking to fill positions in Big Data in comparison with BS and MS institutions. Security is of most interest for top-100 PhD and BS institutions. Software Engineering is much less in demand for top-100 PhD institutions relative to the other institutions in our study. Finally, the abundance of potentially interdisciplinary areas is evident for PhD institutions with at least a third and up to 60% of all positions devoted to these areas. Traditional Computer Science areas such as Data Mining, Machine Learning and Vision have become enablers for interdisciplinary study.

The full report containing a description of the methodology and the complete results is available at http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/CSareas14.pdf.