About Media X > Education

Media X Education

There are several interdisciplinary undergraduate major and masters programs related to Media X: the Symbolic Systems Programs. Another program related to aspects of Media X is the MA Program in Learning Design and Technology. (See below for details of these programs.).

In addition, there are a large number of courses at Stanford that collectively represent a broad spectrum of disciplines and technologies related to Media X. These are the courses taught by faculty affiliated with Media X, and they are also courses that benefit from Media X project funding. Many of these courses convene multidisciplinary teams to build or study technology. Such courses benefit from Media X through provision of funds for class projects, participation of industry researchers as project mentors and team leaders, and support for co-teaching arrangements among Media X faculty from different Stanford departments.

Current Media X related courses include the following:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive Psychology for HCI
• Computer-generated Sound
• Digital Multimedia Tools & Environments
• Experimental Design for Speech Interfaces
• Human Values in Design
• Human-Computer Interface Technology
• Interactive Characters
• Interactive Workspaces
• Introduction to HCI
• Machine Learning
• Media in Education
• Motion Study
• Natural Language Processing
• On-Line Learning Communities
• Organizational Issues in HCI
• People, Computers & Design
• Phenomenological Foundations of Cognition, Language, and Computation
• Psychological Processing of Media
• Research Topics in Graphics & Multimedia
• Visual Representation of Information
• Visual Thinking
• Visualizations in Learning
• Web Credibility: Research & Design

The Symbolic Systems Program

The Stanford Symbolic Systems Program (SSP) is an interdisciplinary degree program administered in the School of Humanities and Sciences. SSP offers B.S. and M.S. degrees in several concentrations; all at the core of Media X research (concentrations include artificial intelligence, learning, human-computer interaction, and computer music). Started in 1986, the evolution of SSP has been similar to the growth of information technology research at Stanford, and as a result the current SSP may accurately be described as the degree programs for Media X.

The Symbolic Systems major was launched (in 1986) by Prof. John Perry, then Director of CSLI, and was brought to fruition by the then Associate Director of CSLI, Prof. Tom Wasow. SSP has consistently attracted the brightest students at Stanford, many of whom have gone on to pursue successful careers in technology. The SSP program graduated 63 students in 2000-01 (the 3rd largest interdepartmental degree at Stanford), with post-graduate job placements at Epiphany, Accenture, Amdahl, Trilogy, Yahoo!, Oracle, Netscape, Citibank, Deloitte Consulting, Google, and Casio, among others.

Many SSP students go on to graduate study in related programs, including recent placements at MIT (Brain and Cognitive Science), UC Berkeley (Computer Science), University of Michigan (Intelligent Systems), UCLA (Neuroscience) Brown University (Neuroscience), Stanford (Computer Science), UCSF (Bioinformatics), University of Minnesota (Speech and Language Pathology), and Edinburgh University (Informatics).

The M.S. program in Symbolic Systems is new in 2001, and was introduced in response to student demand for continuing study. The first two concentrations for the M.S. degree are Human-Computer Interaction and Language Technologies. The M.S. relies heavily on project theses, where students study and build technology solutions in cooperation with Media X faculty and industry sponsors.

The goal of SSP is to provide students with the vocabulary, theoretical background, and technical skills needed to understand and participate in contemporary interdisciplinary research about language, information, and intelligence - both human and machine. The curriculum combines traditional humanistic approaches to these questions with contemporary developments in the science and technology of computation.

MA Program in Learning Design and Technology

The MA Program in Learning Design and Technology prepares professionals to design and evaluate educationally informed and empirically grounded learning environments, products, and programs that effectively employ emergent technologies. In 2002, Stanford began the Ph.D. Program in Learning Sciences and Technology Design. LSTD is dedicated to the systematic study and design of psychological, social, and technological processes that support learning in diverse contexts and across the lifespan, including educational settings.