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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
curriculum for the joint degree program is rigorous, as it combines
requirements from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ph.D.
program in the School of Engineering and from the Media, Technology
& Society (MTS) Ph.D. program in the School of Communication.
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.
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NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
- Justine Cassell (Communication) has returned from her sabbatical at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
- Bryan Pardo (EECS) and Ben Duane (Music Theory and Cognition) co-wrote "Streaming from MIDI using constraint satisfaction optimization and sequence alignment," which they presented at the Proceedings of the 2009 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2009) in Montreal, Quebec in August.
- Lance Fortnow (EECS) set a record for the most downloads for his Communications of the ACM cover story, "The Status of the P versus NP Problem."
- Sheena Lewis, 2nd year PhD
student, was one of 20 students from around the globe awarded a Google
Anita Borg Scholarship, which honors women scholars in technology who
have demonstrated academic success, leadership, and service.
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
AND DEADLINES
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