The Northwestern University Robert E. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and School of Communication offer the combined Ph.D. program in Computer Science and Communication, known as 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 (HCI) and Computer Science methodologies to allow them to understand and participate in technological developments in their broadest possible contexts.

TSB Research Spotlight: "Life on Earth"

Deep Tree Created by Professor Michael Horn and collaborators from other universities, this National Science Foundation-funded project offers innovative ways of teaching the public about evolution and the history of life through common ancestry. Life on Earth allows visitors to explore more than 70,000 related species through interactive visualizations and collaborative games on multi-touch displays. The exhibit will be available in four science museums nationwide this spring.

see more about this project

TSB Research Examples

SocialEQ: Professor Bryan Pardo's research group has developed a new tool that learns the meaning of adjectives describing sound from people on the web. Try it out here.

Omnipedia: Professor Darren Gergle and graduate students Patti Bao and Brent Hecht are studying ways to provide users native language access to over 8 million concepts from up to 25 language editions of Wikipedia. Learn more.

We are also examining the digital divide from sociological, policy and engineering perspectives; exploring ways to use crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding to support creativity and innovation; developing new ways to mine cultural diversity and develop culturally-aware technologies; and designing natural user interfaces for collaboration and learning.

News and Announcements

Welcome new students: We are delighted to welcome the incoming class of TSB PhD students joining us this fall:
Robin Brewer (BS, Computer Science, Maryland; MS, Human-Centered Computing, UMBC), Sarah D'Angelo (BS, Cognitive Science, UCSD), Emily Harburg (BA, Social Anthropology, Harvard), and Marlon Twyman (BS & MS, Biomedical Engineering, Wright State).

NU at CHI: TSB faculty and students are representing Northwestern with four papers at this year's ACM SIGCHI conference in Paris. CHI program >>

NU at CSCW: Congratulations to Northwestern TSB students and faculty who together were part of six papers accepted to the ACM CSCW 2013 conference.

TSB Speaker Series

Our next speaker will be Charlotte Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She will be presenting her talk "Developing Cyberinfrastructures: Data-Centric Virtual Organizations and Scientific Innovation" on Thursday, May 16 at 4pm in the Frances Searle Building, Room 1-483.

previous & upcoming speakers

Awards and Publications

Prof. Jeremy Birnholtz received $500k from the National Science Foundation to support his research to better understand how people pay attention to each other, and can better manage their attention, when working together in distributed groups.

Prof. Liz Gerber received an NSF Cyberlearning Grant to investigate how online crowds can support innovation. She and her collaborator, Carnegie Mellon's Steven Dow, will investigate how the diversity, scale, and immediacy (and sometimes ambiguous and conflicting input) of online crowds affect learning and motivation for project-based innovation work.

TSB Student Spotlight

Congratuations to TSB PhD student Mike Greenberg on being awarded a Segal Design Cluster Fellowship for his research: Gathering Rapid Design Feedback from Crowds for Crowdfunders.

This competitive student fellowship is awarded to exceptional PhD students with a deep interest in interdisciplinary design issues.