|
|
| The Ph.D. program in Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) |
The Ph.D. program in Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) Computers are dramatically changing the way we live, work, play and govern ourselves. These fundamental changes are leading to a co-evolution in both computers and society and the way we think of computers for society. Within science, a new field is emerging to study the impact of computers on society and society on computers, to create and assess computational technology in service of society, and to simultaneously design and assess socially transformational computer technologies and social, organizational, political, and economic processes and policies that transform computation. The Ph.D. program in Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) prepares students to be tomorrow's leaders in constructing, evaluating, and reasoning with computation and an in-depth understanding of the social computing context whether it is society, business, policy, or law.
CMU's innovative program integrates disciplines as diverse as organizational behavior, managerial science, cognitive psychology, biology, privacy, social network analysis, network science, dynamic network analysis, supply chain economics, multi-agent systems,
artificial intelligence, machine learning and computation. Computational social theory, computational management theory, computational policy analysis, computational social networks, privacy and security, open source teams, computation and law, computation and sustainability are part of the computers and society ethos that is COS.
Combining both empirical and computational approaches, students partner in the creation, evaluation and use of future computational tools, measures, and technologies for meeting diverse needs and increasing the scientific, organizational and policy understanding of complex social, corporate, market, legal, national, and international issues. As students work on computational projects, additional constraints from the social, organizational, policy and legal realms are identified and incorporated within the original problem definitions of the emerging technologies, and remain in consideration during development, testing, and evaluation. By taking this approach, the resulting technologies are easier to adopt, better meet the needs of the ultimate users and environments in which they operate, and those environments are better prepared for the new technologies.
Building on the COS program's world-class interdisciplinary faculty, students are equipped to advance theory and practice as well as to invent, evaluate and understand the policy implications of new technologies. The Ph.D. program in exposes students to traditional tenets of computer science inter-weaved with interdisciplinary coursework, hands-on applications and cutting-edge research. Recent examples include privacy technology, dynamic social networks for counter-terrorism and e-business applications. COS prepares students for academic, research and government careers addressing complex problems at the interface of computation, organizations and society. Consequently, students in the COS Ph.D. program are highly sought after due to the in-depth training not just in computation but also in fundamentals of relevant ways of looking at networks of people and organizations, and at their integration into management, law, and policy.
|
The program is designed to:
 provide
students with a unique multi-disciplinary curriculum, rooted heavily
in computer science, and taught by experts from the variety of disciplines
related to COS;
expose students to the latest research results in COS; and
provide practical
hands-on experience with computer science problems related to emerging
technologies and their associated social, political, legal, business,
and organizational conflicts. |
By exposing students to this combination of computer science interleaved
with interdisciplinary coursework, hands-on applications, and cutting-edge
research, we expect our graduates will be uniquely positioned to pioneer
new efforts in the confluence of computer science and business, law
or policy, and to pursue research on the next generation of tools,
algorithms and systems with provable guarantees of their appropriateness
for a particular business, social, policy or legal setting.
For more information contact Connie Herold (cherold [at] cs [dot] cmu [dot] edu).
|
|
