Graduate study in Informatics focuses on all aspects of the relationship between information technology and people, from the models, mechanisms and tools necessary to design and develop software-intensive systems to the methods of following technologies through society and understanding their social shaping and consequences.
Faculty pursue a wide variety of research topics (see the web pages of the individual faculty and our research highlights for up-to-date information), a sample of which include the following topics:
» Programming language models for ubiquitous computing
» Adoption patterns in new communication technologies
» Radically decentralized software architectures
» The use of collaboration technologies in distributed organizations
» The development of information management standards in environmental ecology
» Privacy practices in information systems
» Biologically-inspired models for autonomous agents
» Testing strategies for dynamic architecturesBoth faculty and students have a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, including computer science, information science, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology and sociology.
As a result, research in Informatics tends to be highly collaborative and interdisciplinary. Students work on research projects with different faculty members and different research groups.
Members of the department are affiliated with a number of interdisciplinary research groups.
The Department of Informatics offers a range of courses of graduate study leading to both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science.
More specifically, we organize our graduate curriculum into four programs or concentrations.
Interactive and Collaborative Technology (M.S. and Ph.D.): The ICT track of the Informatics concentration focuses on studying and enhancing the relationship between the design and use of interactive systems and their applications in real-world settings.
Software (M.S. and Ph.D.): The software track of the Informatics concentration focuses on the methods, tools, and processes required to design and build effective large-scale software-intensive systems.
Informatics (M.S. and Ph.D.):The general track of the Informatics concentration covers aspects from both the ICT track and the SW track to broadly cover the topics of Informatics.
Arts, Computation, and Engineering (M.S. only): The ACE concentration is a transdisciplinary program run between the Schools of Information and Computer Sciences, Engineering, and the Arts. It is a both practically grounded and theoretically rigorous exploration of the role of information technology in emerging artistic and cultural practice.
Learn the reason behind the renumbering of courses and get a list of corresponding old numbers to new numbers.
View a short video higlighting how, for more than three decades, the Bren School has been leading many technological advances and spawning countless research breakthroughs.
