SPIRE-EIT (Summer Program for Interdisciplinary Research and Education - Emerging InterfaceTechnologies) at Iowa State University is a 10-week interdisciplinary summer experience for undergraduates that integrates research and education in emerging interface technologies. Students are provided with classroom training and gain hands-on research experience using cutting-edge instruments, equipment, computers and technological infrastructure. Classes in computer programming and graphics, interface design, human computer interaction, and ethics occupy approximately 35% of the students'time. For the remaining time, students conduct interdisciplinary research projects in groups of three. Each group interacts with graduate students in the Human Computer Interaction Graduate Program under the supervision of HCI faculty. The research projects are presented at an end-of-the summer campus- wide research symposium in the form of posters, demos, and a five-page research paper.
Intellectual Merit Two major trends are driving research in Emerging Interface Technologies: a dramatic increase and cheapening of interface technologies themselves, and the ubiquitous permeation of technology into everyday lives. Correspondingly, research questions focus on what new interfaces can be designed and on people's perception, conceptualization, and usage of these interfaces. The SPIRE exposes studentsto four broad areas of EIT: information visualization, mobile/ubiquitous interfaces, intelligent agents, and enabling infrastructure. Because SPIRE-EIT has arisen from the ISU HCI graduate program, with 72 faculty across ISU's seven disciplinary colleges, faculty members compete to have their research projects included in the SPIRE and cite strong benefits from participation afterwards.
Broader Impact As knowledge work and adaptability to new technologies continue to drive global competitiveness, it is imperative for the US to maintain leadership in interdisciplinary technology-based research and training. ISU's HCI graduate program was developed in response to this need, and represents an ideal platform to host SPIRE-EIT. Both the HCI program and SPIRE-EIT recruit with an emphasis on underrepresented groups, preparing students for graduate education in the interdisciplinary area of HCI, an area of importance to the US economy. By including instruction on ethics and on research-based evaluation techniques, the SPIRE gives students skills that are useful lifelong, independent of discipline, and which students might not otherwise encounter in a traditional engineering or computer science curriculum. Because of the connection with HCI, the results of research projects can easily be incorporatedinto faculty members' undergraduate and graduate classes. Professionally, the SPIRE offers an impressivementoring experience for the participants because of the large number of graduate student mentors involved. The experience offers these mentors, in turn, an opportunity to practice mentoring for when they become faculty.
