Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) is a joint Ph.D. program in Computer Science and Communication that draws on Northwestern's strong support for interdisciplinary research, benefits from talented faculty who contribute to a tradition of collaboration, and attracts unique students who are eager for academic experiences that cross traditional departmental boundaries.
Our students come from a variety of backgrounds and receive rigorous training in human-computer interaction, drawing on computer science and social sciences methodologies. The combined degree benefits students by providing: training in a diverse set of quantitative and qualitative methods, 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.
TSB Research Spotlight: "Empowering Female Agents of Change"
Emily Harburg, TSB Ph.D. student and co-founder of Brave Initiatives, has been working with a group of Northwestern students and alumni to build programs that increase female participation in large-scale design projects. Their programs introduces female high school students to design thinking, coding, and leadership training that are used on real-world projects. Participants then use these skills for projects in areas like health, education, and social infrasturcture.
Featured Lab: MU Collective
The MU (Midwest Uncertainty) Collective, lead by Professor Jessica Hullman, explores how data visualization and other tools can best support uncertainty communication and cognition. Researchers in the MU Collective develop novel ways for people to use visualizations to convey complex data and uncertainty information in ways that people can understand, such as new visualization techniques, interaction paradigms, authoring systems, and models of cognition.
TSB Research Examples
Life on Earth: Professor Michael Horn and collaborators created Life on Earth to teach the public about evolution and the history of life through interactive visualizations and collaborative games on multi-touch displays.
See more here.
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.
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; studying and designing new technologies for health; and designing natural user interfaces for collaboration, learning, and accessibility.
News and Announcements
NU at CHI: Northwestern faculty and students are authors on 14 papers and over 25 presentations at the CHI 2019 conference, 3 of which won Best Paper, Honorable Mention Awards.
NU at CSCW: Northwestern faculty and students were authors on 15 papers presented at the CSCW 2018 conference.
Congratulations to recent TSB doctoral graduates Sarah D'Angelo, who is a User Experience Researcher at Google; Emily Harburg, who is Co-Founder and Director of Programs at Brave Initiatives; Matthew Heston, who is a Data Scientist at Sprout Social, Inc.; Robin Brewer, who is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan's School of Information; and Pei-Yi Kuo, who is an Assistant Professor at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
TSB Speaker Series
The TSB Distinguished Colloquium take place on select Thursdays @ 4pm. Check out our list of previous and upcoming speakers for the talk series.
Awards and Publications
Congratulations to Prof. Jessica Hullman on her NSF CAREER Award! The prestigious award will support her work on "Enhancing Critical Reflection on Data by Integrating Users' Expectations in Visualization Interaction".
TSB Student Spotlight
Congratulations to TSB students: Marlon Twyman on receiving the Donald H. and Carolyn E. Ecroyd Fellowship, Yixue Wang on receiving a Data Science Fellowship, and Jim Maddock and Emily Wang on receiving NSF fellowships!