REU Site: Summer Program for Interdisciplinary Research and Education-Emerging Interface Technologies

SPIRE-EIT (Summer Program for Interdisciplinary Research and Education - Emerging Interface Technologies) at Iowa State University is a 10-week summer program for undergraduates that integrates research and education about emerging interface technologies. Students gain hands-on research experience using cyberinfrastructure and take brief focused classes in computer programming, 3D 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. SPIRE-EIT recruits with an emphasis on underrepresented groups, preparing students for graduate education in the interdisciplinary area of human computer interaction, an area of importance to the U.S. 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. 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 emerging technologies: information visualization; mobile/ubiquitous interfaces; extended, virtual, and augmented reality; and intelligent software agents. These research questions will be explored through projects such as career pathways through immersive storytelling in XR, multiagent trajectory representation in XR, testbed for human-agent teaming behavior understanding, and adaptations to cybersickness. Research projects are designed so that undergraduates (in teams of three) can make a meaningful contribution. Faculty in Iowa State University's Human Computer Interaction graduate program compete to participate in the SPIRE and cite strong benefits from participation afterwards. Each year, the SPIRE projects typically result in one-two professional academic conference presentations with SPIRE students as co-authors, which distributes SPIRE research results to the public. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.