Two new courses are being taught this fall – reflecting IST’s ongoing commitment to explore IT’s evolving landscape.
In Guoray Cai’s course, IST 597C: Human-Centered Geographic Information Systems, students are designing systems to help people use geographic information to make decisions. Those systems will include speech and language processing.
Also required is an understanding of user needs, tasks and goals, so that a system is designed for the user instead of the user having to adapt to the system.
“Once users become co-designers, then a system can be created that can interact with users more naturally to provide the needed information,” said Cai, an assistant professor.
Also emphasizing human-computer interaction is IST 597D: Models and Theories of HCI. The course, said Mary Beth Rosson, presents the multi-disciplinary foundations of HCI from theories of perception and motor behavior that analyze how people interact with a system to theories of distributed cognition or how people work together using computing technologies.
“This course helps students plan and carry out original research using accepted HCI concepts and methods,” Rosson said.
