9451851 Kaufman User interfaces and multimedia technologies will be of critical importance in computer applications for the nineties and beyond. Facilities for training undergraduates in these areas are limited, both at Stony Brook and elsewhere. Training requires collaboration between computer scientists and psychologists, as well as specialized computer systems that support images, sound, video, and advanced I/O devices. The Departments of Computer Science and Psychology at Stony Brook have recently been awarded an NSF Educational Infrastructure grant to develop an innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum in the design and implementation aspects of computer-human interaction and multimedia. The curriculum consists of nine courses: User Interface Development, Human Information Processing, Computer Graphics, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Visualization, Multimedia, Human Factors in Interface Design, and two Senior Design courses. We are creating an undergraduate multimedia user-interface lab, the MULTI-Lab, which enables the implementation of the curriculum with over 150 undergraduates every semester. The MULTI-Lab is paramount to the success of our curriculum. Every participating student has hands-on experience in the design, prototyping, and evaluation of a variety of user interfaces and multimedia systems. The MULTI-Lab is a data-, audio-, and video-networked heterogeneous laboratory of multimedia Macintoshes, with a few PCs and Sun Unix workstations, along with a selection of I/O devices and multi-media peripherals. The instructional material for the curriculum is multimedia courseware and software that will be disseminated widely as a set of CD-ROMs and monographs in a series called "Stony Brook Curriculum in Computer-Human Interaction."
