Department of Computer Science Colloquium
Thursday, September 26, 2002, 4:15pm 
Upson Hall B17

A Research Program for Information Science

William Arms
Cornell University

The Faculty of Computing and Information Science is proposing that Cornell creates a new Ph.D. program in Information Science. This colloquium will discuss the intellectual motivation behind the plan.

Cornell sees Information Science as the study of digital information from three interwoven perspectives: computer science, human computer interaction and society. The talk will emphasize interdependencies between these perspectives, in particular how problems that appear to be purely technical cannot be addressed without an understanding of the people involved and the economic, social, legal and cultural framework in which they exist. The talk will be illustrated by examples from current research at Cornell and the NSF's new National Science Digital Library.