This IGERT program is a multi-disciplinary doctoral traineeship in Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions (STIET). The extraordinarily rapid changes in communications and computing technology, and in the uses and requirements people have for these technologies, have given rise to problems that are not well-suited to narrow, traditional solutions. That these problems are important should be self-evident: electronic transactions are increasingly central to social, economic and political activity in nearly every realm of human endeavor, within and between nearly every location on the planet. The infrastructure to support safe, meaningful, efficient, equitable and productive transactions will determine the extent to which the information revolution is socially beneficial. STIET will offer a comprehensive program from matriculation to graduation that will focus on the interaction between social and technical mechanisms in order to respond to these needs through current research and the training of a corps of scholars to carry forward teaching and research in this area. The program will: (i) provide fellowships for the first two years of graduate study; (ii) require 3 STIET core courses and 2 advanced STIET electives; (iii) provide a weekly research seminar and biannual day-long workshops; (iv) develop a multi-disciplinary, cross-school community of scholars within Michigan through collective and collaborative activities, both synchronous and asynchronous (with computer-supported community and collaboration technologies); and (v) build connections to the external multi-disciplinary research community through its Web site, conference travel, and research experiences at industrial partner facilities. When fully implemented, the program is expected to engage about 35 doctoral students at various stages of their degree. Through the resources and activities of STIET, the students will be encouraged and supported so that they receive serious preparation for multi-disciplinary research and pursue multi-disciplinary approaches to understanding and solving important socio-technical problems in their dissertation research. A large group of faculty are involved from several disciplines (computer science, economics, information, business, public policy) with a long-standing commitment to multi-disciplinary and collaborative research. The team includes collaborative research partners from prominent industrial labs. A professional Master's programs in this area is already in place, which provide a graduate student community, a student services infrastructure, and a fertile recruiting ground for promising doctoral students.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; and Education and Human Resources.
