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School of Information
Graduate programs, HCI, CSCW, Information Sciences.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
The School of Information was created to develop and apply an integrated understanding of human needs and their relationships to information systems and social structures. The School's educational mission is to train information professionals to be able to synthesize human-centered and technical perspectives in such areas as library and information science, archives and records management, human-computer interaction, future systems architectures, and organizational information systems. The School has embarked on a multi-year plan to expand its academic and research programs, including corresponding increases the size of both the faculty and student body. This expansion is being facilitated by innovative use of information technology to support all of its programs, including technologies that relax the constraints of time and distance. In alliance with the Kellogg Foundation the School is developing ambitious global educational and service activities that are a key element of the School's instructional programs. The School's programs are supported by a mixture of federal and private sponsors, and include particularly strong efforts in the areas of digital libraries and collaboration technologies. For further information about the School of Information, consult our Web site at www.si.umich.edu.
The School of Information has 26 faculty, many with joint appointments in other schools and departments around the University. The principal faculty in HCI and CSCW at the School are Dan Atkins, Bill Birmingham, Ed Durfee, George Furnas, Gary Olson, Judy Olson, and Elliot Soloway. Other faculty at Michigan who are active in these areas and are currently affiliates of the School include Atul Prakash, Tom Finholt, Farnam Jahanian, Dave Kieras, and John Laird. There are also a number of research faculty, adjuncts, and postdocs associated with the school.
The MSI programs focus on professional training for careers in several information sciences. At present the School has specializations in Library and Information Science (LIS), Archives and Records Management (ARM), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Programs under development include Future Systems Architectures (FSA), Organizational Information Management (OIM), and Digital Publishing. We also anticipate developing joint programs with a number of other professional schools, including medicine, law, education, business administration, engineering, and social work.
The MSI in HCI is a 48 credit program, normally taking four full-time semesters to complete. It stresses user-centered development methods, context-based design, analytic as well as empirical evaluation of systems, information visualization, group as well as individual work, and a wide range of specific application domains. Each MSI student participates in a substantial practical engagement as part of their training.
The PhD program offers advanced training in all of the above areas (and their intersections). Doctoral students work closely with faculty on research projects like those described below.
The School of Information and its associated research center, the Collaboratory for Research in Electronic Work (CREW), have numerous multidisciplinary research projects in the areas of HCI and CSCW. Projects are funded both by federal agencies (e.g., NSF, ARPA, NIH) and companies (e.g., Intel, Ameritech, AT&T, Ford, Steelcase). Many of these projects involve collaborations between the School of Information and faculty and students from other parts of the University. The School also hosts a number of visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows.
We briefly describe a selected set of projects. All of these projects have substantial HCI components, including needs analysis, user interface design, iterative software development, and long-term deployment and evaluation studies.
The national Digital Library Initiative (DLI) is a series of six large projects funded by NSF, ARPA, and NASA. UMDL is one of these projects. The project aims to gain insight into the creation, operation, and use of advanced digital libraries. Many faculty, research staff, and students from School of Information participate. Other participants come from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, the University Libraries, the Computer-Aided Engineering Network, the Information Technology Division, Ann Arbor Public Schools, Ann Arbor Public Library, the New York Public Library, Bellcore, McGraw-Hill, UMI, Inc., Elsevier, Encyclopedia Britannica, IBM, Apple Computers, and Kodak. The UMDL provides customized access to significant public domain collections of scientific data and information in the areas of earth and space science, using an agent architecture.
UMDL addresses a complex array of technical and socioeconomic issues. The research is focused by following the design, construction, and evaluation by real users of a testbed system. The testbed consists of a cooperating set of three types of software agents: user interface agents, mediation agents, and collection agents. A prototype system and further technical details can be examined at www.si.umich.edu/UMDL/.
This is a joint venture of researchers in upper atmospheric and space physics, computer science, and behavioral science at the U-M and a series of laboratories in North American and Europe. The UARC project, with the support of NSF, has developed an international networked collaboration laboratory (a "collaboratory") in which computing and communication technology are combined to allow geographically distributed space scientists to work together while viewing events relayed through instruments in Greenland. The project has investigated and deployed various architectures for building collaboratories on the Internet, and has currently deployed a system that can be accessed through the World Wide Web. A longitudinal study of the use of the system has provided lessons about the impact of collaboratory technology on a community of users. Further details are available at www.si.umich.edu/ UARC/.
This project is developing a testbed to support collaboration over medical images for diagnosis involving primary health care physicians and health care specialists. This is based on a prototype testbed to support remote healthcare linking primary care facilities with The University of Michigan Medical Center. The project simultaneously addresses issues on three fronts: the development of new collaboration technology, the development of a toolkit for a medical application domain, and the systematic evaluation of the effect of the introduction of collaboration technology on the current practice of consulting. Further details are available at www.si.umich.edu/medcollab/.
In recent years, the kinds of large, complex information worlds that are emerging have led to a number of strategies in computer interfaces, including fisheye viewers, the Perspective Wall, multiple-zoom viewers, and infinite interactive zoom viewers. Several new kinds of information visualization schemes are being investigated, including space-scale diagrams (roughly analogous to space-time diagrams), multitrees (a cross of trees and directed graphs), view-navigable structures, and prosections. The perceptual and cognitive issues involved in such visualizations are investigated, and prototype systems using them are developed and evaluated. Many of these projects are described at www.si.umich.edu/~furnas/HomePage.html.
The Highly-Interactive Computing Research Group is a cooperative effort between the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor Public Schools to create an innovative, integrated, technology-intensive science program. We work closely with middle and high schools to research ways in which computers can aid in, and further stimulate the educational process. Through interaction with students, educators, and administrators at local schools, we are trying to determine which types of applications and tools are most beneficial for educators and students. This project is a cooperative venture between the School of Information, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the School of Education. Additional information is available at hi-c.eecs.umich.edu/index.html.
A series of laboratory studies are being conducted to examine what kinds of computing and communication technologies are useful for distributed work groups that are carrying out intellectual tasks. We have both built groupware tools and examined off-the-shelf technologies. Evaluation focuses on process, outcome, and satisfaction measures. Additional information can be found at www.crew.umich.edu.
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