SPRING 2017

Master's Capstone Project (The Moderation Machine)

Quantitative Research Methods for Information Systems

Information and Communications Technology for Development

FALL 2016

Qualitative Research Methods

  • Interviewing, focus groups, participant observation and ethnography taught and practiced
  • Analysis of significant qualitative research findings in the area of social impact of information technologies
  • Primary assignment: engagement in a substantial fieldwork project

Managing in Information Intensive Companies

  • Managing knowledge workers
  • Managing teams (including virtual ones) 
  • Managing Collaborating across disparate units
  • Giving and receiving feedback
  • Managing the Innovation process (including. in eco-systems)

Applied Natural Language Processing

  • State-of-the-art in applied NLP (also known as content analysis and language engineering)
  • Evaluation of performance of existing algorithms and how they can be used (or not) in applications
  • Part-of-speech, shallow parsing, classification, extraction, incorporation of lexicons and ontologies, and question answering
  • Apply and extend existing software tools to text-processing problems
  • Python, NLTK

Technology & Delegation

  • Consider techniques for identifying policy and values issues in technical design
  • Consider the risks and benefits of embedding value and policy choices through technical design versus the adoption of policies or procedures, and rigorously consider the hand-off among them.
  • Topics will include the policy implications of standards, the process and implication of translating law into technological forms, governance implications of government adoption of technology, use of technology to regulate behavior and make decisions, and values-in-design frameworks. 

Information Organization Lab

  • Apply concepts and techniques for information architecture, resource description and transformation, categorization, and interaction design.  
  • Data modeling, API design, responsive front-end design, version control, and deployment using Python, XML, jQuery and other tools and frameworks.

SPRING 2016

Information Visualization

  • Hands-on overview of the field of Information Visualization
  • Readings, lectures, and assignments cover visualization principles, tools, and frameworks
  • Discuss and critique existing visualizations and their effectiveness in conveying information
  • Highcharts, Illustrator, D3, Tableau

Information Law and Policy

  • Copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases
  • Licensing of information
  • Consumer protection
  • Liability for insecure systems and defective information
  • Privacy
  • National and international information policy

Social Issues of Information

The following three questions guide the material in this course and are considered at varying levels of analysis from the micro (i.e., interpersonal relationships and information in small groups) to the macro level (i.e., organizational and institutional problems of information): 

  • Why do social scientists study information and information technology?
  • What are some of the key topics and issues that are studied?
  • How do we study these issues? 

Eat.Think.Design

  • Interdisciplinary innovation course in the School of Public Health that addresses big challenges in food and food systems. 
  • How might we systematically design innovative interventions and programs in public health? 
  • Students work on domestic and global innovation projects with external clients that will be implemented.

Needs and Usability Assessment (Dedicated Course Auditor)

  • concepts and methods of user experience research
  • emphasis on methods of collecting and interpreting many kinds of data about real-world user activities and practices
  • Translating data into design decisions
  • heuristic evaluation; observation; interviews, surveys and focus groups

Fall 2015

User Interface Design and Development    |    Human-Computer Interaction

  • Human capabilities (e.g., visual and auditory perception, memory, mental models, and interface metaphors);
  • Interface technology (e.g., input and output devices, interaction styles, and common interface paradigms); and,
  • Interface design methods (e.g., user-centered design, prototyping, and design principles and rules), and interface evaluation (e.g., software logging, user observation, benchmarks and experiments).

Information Architecture

  • conceptual modeling
  • vocabulary and metadata design
  • classification and standardization
  • information organization and retrieval practices, technology, and applications
  • computational processes for analyzing information

Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure

  • Python & object-oriented programming
  • Computer Architecture & Data Structures
  • Operating Systems
  • Networking & Security

Applied Behavioral Economics for Information Systems

  • Using theories of human behavior to inform product design, experiment design, and testing design for technology solutions