HCI Scene

Related Degree Programs: The HCI area of study is applicable to many major fields, including 13 directly related degree programs at Georgia Tech.

Research—Institutes, Centers, and Labs: Going by various names, and ranging in scope from Labs organized by one or two faculty members within a school, to cross-school Centers, to the massive Georgia Tech Research Institute, you will find hundreds of HCI-related research activities.

Courses: Many of the HCI-related courses are listed on our courses page. New courses are continually being developed, so this list may not always be completely accurate. The MS-HCI program aims to flexibly meet the interests and needs of our students; non-listed HCI-relevant courses can almost always be used to satisfy degree requirements.

Seminars: The program also grants credit for seven different seminars on campus related to HCI, including robotics and home technologies. One in particular, headed by the program coordinator, is a required seminar for all MS-HCI students. The HCI Seminar includes presentations by leading HCI practitioners concerning career choices and preparation and about new developments, visits to corporate HCI labs in the Atlanta area, talks and discussions about potential MS projects and “how to succeed” in graduate school and as a professional. Any MS-HCI student may attend regardless of enrollment in the class. Any speakers interested in leading a seminar are welcome and may contact the program coordinators for more information.

Beyond Georgia Tech, the greater Atlanta metropolitan area is a hotbed of user experience, user interface and human-computer interaction activities. We don’t have an exact count, but there are certainly several thousand professionals, working in companies large and small. Many, such as Home Depot, Delta, NCR, CNN, Turner Broadcasting, AT&T, Verizon, IBM, Google, and UPS,  have headquarter or regional offices here. There are also national and local advertising, web strategy, and design companies and consultancies. We also host a significant number of start-ups in the web space, including some started by MS-HCI alumni and nurtured in Georgia Tech’s incubator. With all these professionals working in a variety of roles, several professional groups have developed. Many of our students take advantage of the networking and career development opportunities presented by these groups:

You can also find a good sample of our Tweeters by searching for Atlanta user experience, Atlanta UX, or Atlanta UI. Georgia Tech alone is a crucible of HCI research. For instance, the annual GVU Center and Digital Media “Demo Days” typically showcases about 100 projects. Many master’s projects are supervised by faculty and researchers from the schools, research labs, centers, and institutes who participate in these events. Other projects are done in partnership with companies in the Atlanta area and beyond, often supervised by alumni of our program or members of our Industrial Advisory Board. And there are always HCI-related activities happening at GT and in Atlanta: weekly lunch-time talks by faculty and graduate students, design course poster sessions, meetups, gatherings of the local CHI and IxDA chapters and the GT Human Factors Society Chapter, Industrial Design showcases, distinguished lectures by visitors from Google, Microsoft, IBM and many others. All this creates a wonderful HCI community, a melting pot of ideas that makes being here very exciting and energizing.

Last modified: Mar. 31, 2016