The Northwestern University School of Communication and Robert E. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science announce the combined Ph.D. program in Computer Science and Communication, to be known as the Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior.

THE Ph.D. IN TECHNOLOGY AND
SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
The study of Technology and Social Behavior involves many disciplines, but until now it has been rare to find graduate training that prepares students to bridge several of those disciplines in the way that is so demanded by both academic and industry research jobs of today. The Northwestern TSB doctoral program recruits students from a variety of backgrounds and gives them rigorous training in Humanities, Social Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science methodologies to allow them to understand and participate in technological developments in their broadest possible contexts.

Examples of TSB Research
Ph.D. students can join faculty from across the Northwestern campus in the study of phenomena as timely and innovative as:

• The digital divide from sociological, policy, and engineering perspectives.
• Interactive technologies for children, and understanding their effects on children's development.
• History of information and communication technologies.
• Automobiles that sense the environment and communicate with their drivers, without alarming them.
• Trust development in computer-mediated communication environments.
• Technologies to support distance collaboration.
• Cellphones that can "name that tune".
• Psychology of virtual humans.
• Non-player characters in MMRPGs that gossip.
• The effects of digital technology on libraries, newspapers and other providers and purveyors of printed matter.
• Self-generating music videos.
• Technology use in global perspective.
• Language and behavior in on-line communities.
• Moral panic surrounding girls on-line.
• Genre and interactivity in videogames.
• On-line Youth leadership.
• Mind and Society in the information age.

The combined degree benefits students by providing training in multiple methodologies to study human behavior and computer technology; experience designing and implementing new technologies; practice incorporating the results of empirical research into these technologies; and preparation for the widest range of academic and industrial jobs.

Students in the TSB doctoral program have the opportunity to spend summers carrying out research on the Evanston campus, or to do internships in industry research labs such as IBM, Google, MITRE and Microsoft.

On the job market, the TSB joint degree in Computer Science and Communication will give students strong credentials for jobs in both academia and industry. In academia, our graduates make strong candidates for jobs in both traditional and emerging departments such as: Information Technology, Library and Information Sciences, Information Systems (or Informatics), New Media, Communications, Computer Science, Learning Sciences, and Cognitive Science departments. While interdisciplinary research is fundamental to discovery and progress, evaluating this research from traditional perspectives can be problematic. The joint degree prepares graduates with the authority to communicate about their research within multiple disciplines.

• Justine Cassell (Communication, EECS, and Learning Science) has just received the 2008 Women of Vision award for Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, which "recognizes a woman who has led an important technology development or innovation, made a significant contribution to the technology industry, and inspired others."
• Jack Tumblin (EECS) features in the March-April edition of American Scientist. The article entitled "Computational Photography" notes Tumblin's work examining object velocity to remove motion blur.
• Justine Cassell will be giving a keynote address at the Artificial Intelligence and Social Behavior Conference (AISB) taking place in Aberdeen, UK at the start of April.
• Eszter Hargittai's paper 'The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence' which will appear in The Hyperlinked Society (Edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui) published by The University of Michigan Press.
• Justine Cassell received a grant from the NSF ALT (Advanced Learning Technologies) program to support her research investigating whether code-switching virtual peers may play a role in reducing the achievement gap.
  
• Professors Justine Cassell, Darren Gergle, and Sid Horton received a major grant from the NSF to study the biological, contextual and social factors that influence conversational grounding behavior in people and machines.
• Peter Dinda (EECS) will be presenting a paper at the 13th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.
  
• Professor Darren Gergle was given a $50K research gift from Microsoft to study collaborative technologies.
• Professors Pablo J. Boczkowski, Justine Cassell, Darren Gergle, Eszter Hargittai, and Paul Leonardi were all awarded grants from the Robert and Kay Hiatt Fund.
• The Center for Technology and Social Behavior has received a $100,000 gift from the Autism Speaks Foundation.
• Professor Don Norman has been appointed the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Senior Professor in Design.
• Francisco Iacobelli and Professor Justine Cassell presented their paper entitled "Ethnic Identity and Engagement in Embodied Conversational Agents" in September at the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) in Paris.
• CTSB postdoc Alastair Gill was a part of three different sessions at the recent Society for Text and Discourse meetings in Glasgow, Scotland.

• LREC 2008 in Marrakech, Morroco (May 28-30, 2008).
• MOG 2008 in Aberdeen, Scotland (April 3-4, 2008).
• CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy (April 5-10, 2008).
• VIRTUAL WORLDS Conference - Intel Research / UC Irvine (April 25-26, 2008).
• INLG 2008 in Salt Fork, Ohio (June 12-14, 2008). Submission deadline for papers and posters is March 21, 2008.
• LONDIAL 2008 in London, UK (June 2-4, 2008). Submissions due March 21, 2008.
• IDC 2008 (Interaction Design for Children) 2008 will be held at Northwestern (June 11-13, 2008). Posters, demos, doctoral papers, and workshop papers due March 3, 2008.
  
• COLING 2008 in Manchester, England (August 18-22, 2008). Submission deadline for main conference is March 20, 2008.