REU Site: Summer Program for Interdisciplinary Research and Education - Emerging Interface Technologies (SPIRE-EIT)

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SPIRE-EIT (Summer Program for Interdisciplinary Research and Education - Emerging InterfaceTechnologies) at Iowa State University is a 10-week summer program for undergraduates that integrates research and education in emerging interface technologies. Students gain hands-on research experience using cyberinfrastructure and take brief focused classes in computer programming and graphics, and human computer interaction. For the remaining time, students conduct interdisciplinary research projects in groups. 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 in interface technologies themselves, and the ubiquitous permeation of technology into everyday lives. Correspondingly, research questions focus on four broad areas of EIT: information visualization, mobile/ubiquitous interfaces, intelligent agents, and enabling infrastructure. Faculty in ISU's HCI graduate program compete to participate in the SPIRE and cite strong benefits from participation afterwards. Broader Impact: 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. Each year, the SPIRE projects typically result in one-two professional academic conference presentations with SPIRE students as co-authors, disseminating its research results.