between people and digital systems and in developing systems that perceive, understand, and interact with people and the environment? The intelligent and interactive systems (IIS) track may be for you. You’ll focus on areas such as:
Investigating and building technologies involves understanding relationships between people and computing systems, as well as developing systems that are better able to understand and interact. As an IIS student, you’ll explore theories, develop prototype technologies, and evaluate human responses to and interactions with those technologies.
The R-House Human-Robot Interaction Lab hosts researchers, students, and visitors interested in studying human-robot interaction (HRI) through the design and evaluation of robotic technologies for everyday use. Lab members explore the connections between HRI, human social behavior and cognition, and the emerging social meanings and consequences through a variety of methods.
Learn about the R-HouseIntelligent and Interactive Systems (IIS) is an interdisciplinary field that studies the interactions between humans and digital technologies, and develops intelligent technologies that can interact with humans and their environment. Research and teaching in the field include artificial intelligence, music informatics, computer vision, human-robot interaction, dynamical systems, and cognitive science, among others. Students and faculty explore theories, develop prototype technologies, as well as evaluating interactions between humans and these technologies.
Intelligent and interactive technologies are becoming an increasingly important part of people’s daily lives. For instance, robots cooperate with humans, enabling them to perform common tasks, while pervasive wearable devices monitor our health habits and daily activities, and cloud-based systems seek to identify the sights and sounds of our surroundings. Investigating and building these technologies involves both understanding the relationship between people and computing systems, as well as technological advances in making computers better able to understand, perceive, and interact with their environment.
The Intelligent and Interactive Systems track in Informatics is a multidisciplinary program that approaches information and communication technology from both technological and human perspectives. Graduate students will have the opportunity to explore a diverse range of research topics, including autonomous robots, computer vision, music informatics, culturally-situated technology design, dynamical systems, human-robot interaction, object and activity recognition, social robotics, video and image understanding, and wearable and ubiquitous computing.
Chris Raphael: Track Director
Music in informatics, artificial intelligence, accompaniment systems, computer generated musical analysis, musical signal processing, modeling of musical interpretation, computer generated musical analysis, data science, machine learning
Cognitive science, computational and theoretical biology. Understanding how coordinated behavior arises from the dynamical interaction of an animal’s nervous system, its body and its environment. Evolution and analysis of dynamical “nervous systems” for model agents neuromechanical modeling of animals, biologically-inspired robotics, and dynamical systems approaches to behavior and cognition.
Computer vision, object recognition, 3d reconstruction, image processing, artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, social media, wearable computers.
Human-robot interaction, social robotics, human-centered computing, cross-cultural studies of technology design and use, science and technology studies assistive technology, user-centered design and evaluation.
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Artificial Intelligence, Complex Networks and Systems, Intelligent Interactive Systems, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science
Cognitive science, developmental psychology, language learning, embodied social cognition multimodal human-human and human-robot interactions, perception and action, data mining and computational modeling.
All courses provided by faculty in the Intelligent and Interactive Systems track, including the I609 Advanced Seminar, are open to and welcome students from other tracks and programs.
A student must successfully complete ninety (90) credit hours of graduate-level course work. The specific track requirements are listed below.
NOTE: A student must take I609 and/or I709.
NOTE: A student must complete two rotations of I790. A third rotation will not count for course credit.
NOTE: These courses must be appropriate for a Ph.D. in Informatics.
NOTE: Typical minors include Cognitive Science, Statistics, Computer Science, and Human-Computer Interaction.
NOTE: A student must have all electives approved by the student's advisor and the Director of Informatics Graduate Studies prior to enrolling in the course.
All IIS track students are required to take both a course that will help them develop their technical skills in the field (e.g. artificial intelligence, computer vision, advanced prototyping), and a course that presents the conceptual and human-oriented aspects of the field (e.g. human-robot interaction, embodied cognition). Either course can be taken as their second seminar. The chosen course should be appropriate for the student’s professional development. In this way students will have the ability to communicate across the multiple disciplines that compose the domain of IIS research.
In addition to required courses, faculty in the track offer courses that provide more targeted training is specific areas.
Additionally, a number of courses taught by other faculty are also relevant to the ISS track:
Cognitive Science, Statistics, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction.
Written and oral examinations will be decided by the student’s committee based on his or her research interests. A typical exam can consist of writing a survey paper and two shorter papers each reporting on a project or problem assigned by the committee, or it can consist of an annotated bibliography preceded by an essay that describes the student’s interpretation of the relevant literature and how they situate their own interests and work within it. The written portion of the exam is followed by an oral exam to defend the written submissions.
Since IIS is new, we have so far graduated one doctoral student, Jangwon Lee, in 2018, with a thesis titled “Learning Activities from Human Demonstration Videos” (supervised by Crandall and Šabanović. Now at ObjectVideo Labs).
IIS core faculty have supervised Ph.D. students in other tracks who have successfully defended, including:
