inter actionISSUE 5 • WINTER 2007 • STANFORD UNIVERSITY • MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

COMPUTATIONAL MATHThere are few areas of academia that don’t involve numbers, and the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering is there to ensure that the math is solid, page 5

DesIgN THINKINgApproaching problems the right way can have positive effects from engineering labs to rice fields, page 2

sIMULATINg THe BODYThe Simbios center, housed in Bioengineering and funded by the NIH, applies computation to the life sciences,page 5

NANO-eTHICsA Stanford professor and his colleagues have conducted a survey about the ethical and safety principles held by researchers at 13 universities, including Stanford, page 6

see story, page 2

since the rise of industrialization, or perhaps even earlier, machines have been

regarded as potential threats to our humanity, something oppressive, worthy of suspicion,

certainly external. Machines were not our friends. If they are not exactly our friends today,

our relationship with them, what practitioners call the user interface, has become a matter

of understanding, communication, even empathy. We and our ubiquitous machines must

interact in ways that make sense, both in terms of our sensibility and in terms of results.

What makes Stanford different, according to the people at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, oth-erwise known as the d.school, is “design thinking,” the philosophy that good process ensures good ends and that problems can be solved through observation.

“At Stanford, we have the image of a ‘T,’” said Ber-nard Roth, a pioneer in robotics, haptics and kinemat-ics. A problem-solver starts with a principal skill, the vertical leg of the “T,” but uses other tools to branch out. The approach “is similar to life itself in that it builds on experience and applies that to problems. Problem-solvers don’t need expertise in any one disci-pline. We use observation, figure out needs, then go back to our own disciplines with a broader array of skills.”

That “T” Roth referred to originated with Ideo, the famed design company launched by fellow d.school founder and its principal public face, David Kelley. It all

started more or less in 1958, with the establishment of the Product Design Program shared by the Mechanical Engineering and Art departments. Kelley was a student in that program, and he (and several of his classmates) ended up teaching here. Kelley went on to found Ideo, which was modeled on Product Design, and that spooled back into new teaching methods at Stanford.

Years later, Kelley and artificial intelligence pioneer Terry Wino-grad began teaching courses on product design and human-com-puter interaction (HCI), and one thing led to another, which led to the d.school.

They key word at the d.school is “prototype,” used as both a

noun and a verb. Basically, it’s nonstop inventiveness to meet human needs.

George Kembel, another Product Design graduate, is executive director of the d.school, which belongs to the School of Engineering but draws faculty and

The World as Prototype

2 WINTER 2007

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Since the rise of industrialization, or per-haps even earlier, machines have been regarded as potential threats to our hu-manity, something oppressive, worthy of suspicion, certainly external. Machines were not our friends.

If they are not exactly our friends today, our relationship with them, what practitio-

ners call the user interface, has become a matter of un-derstanding, communication, even empathy. We and our ubiquitous machines must interact in ways that make sense, both in terms of our sensibility and in terms of results.

The field of Human Computer In-teraction (HCI), which at Stanford is a group within the Computer Science Department, is dedicated to mini-mizing the barrier between human cognition and experience, on the one hand, and software and hardware, on the other. Researchers work at both ends of this relationship—the social and the mechanical—and in between. They come from the social and behavioral sciences, engineering, computer science and education.

Like “environment,” which implicitly suggests a sphere in which nature and humans interact—that is, a terrain both external and internal to us—HCI embodies a relationship and, implicitly, responsibility.

HCI means different things to different people, de-pending where they are on the scientific spectrum and on whether they are interested in the relationship between a particular user and his technology or among many us-ers who communicate via technology. Though we have a one-on-one relationship with our machines, our rela-tionships with each other and, in fact, with ourselves, are also mediated by them.

Scott Klemmer, an assistant professor of computer sci-

ence and co-director of the HCI group, said HCI “stud-ies people acting through technology. The difference be-tween HCI and other areas of computer science is that for much of computer science, the metric of success is the system [speed, capacity, etc.], while for us what mat-ters is the user experience.”

With a background in design and computer graphics, Klemmer felt that an element was missing from many of his computer science classes when he was an undergrad-uate. “It was all about how we implement technology, and I wanted to know why we implement it. I wanted to create tools to enable designers and users to be more cre-

ative and to think about how com-puting can be better integrated into the practical logic of everyday life.”

Conceptually, his work lies at the intersection of computer users, com-puter scientists and designers. It is a big intersection, with lots of interac-tion, for there is virtually no part of our lives that is not linked to com-puter technology and that couldn’t be linked better. With the goal of enabling a prototyping culture, an

expression heard often at the Design Institute (see story below), Klemmer has worked on such projects as a pen-and-notebook system that combines the best of paper and computer record-keeping; field research tools that make sense for researchers in the wild; a study of tech-nological mash-ups (composites of online or hardware sources) for “opportunistic design”; and a system that balances physical and virtual design with the simultane-ous development of hardware and software. At the heart of his work always is a preoccupation with human needs in the real, everyday world.

Getting there from hereTwo components of everyday life studied by a psychol-

ogist who works on HCI projects are route maps and as-

Watch and listen, figure out the problem,

then solve it.

Interacting with

Burmese children gathered around a water pump frame

developed with the help of people from the d.school.

Minimizing the barrier between software and hardware, human cognition and experience

our computers

Human-computer interaction embodies a

relationship.

Sarah Stein GreenberG

When robots such as Chip are dressed

as humans, researchers have found

that people attribute more responsibil-

ity to the robot and less to themselves.

Left, Chip unclothed.

CourteSy Pamela hindS

WINTER 2007 �

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sembly instructions, that bane of every casual furniture shopper. Clearly, this is an area where the technology (in this case, visualization) does not respond to ordinary human cognition.

Psychology Professor Emerita Barbara Tversky and her collaborators in computer science started off by working on maps. They wanted to use computers to represent cognitive design principles in algorithms that could then automate the generation of effective visual-ization. In other words, computers could be made to un-derstand and illuminate how people actually visualize directions.

With undergraduates as her guide—they were asked to draw a map to a nearby Taco Bell—Tversky figured out how people think in sequences and hierarchies and how much information they actually need in order to get where they need to go. Then, graduate students Maneesh Agrawala and Chris Stolte produced the al-gorithms that could generate maps. (Both have since earned their doctoral degrees.)

From there the team bravely moved on to assembly in-structions, specifically for a television cart. The process

was much the same; once again, undergraduates were observed, and “computer-generated instructions won hands-down” compared to manufacturer’s instructions that came in the box or to the best hand-drawn ones, Tversky said. (The resulting software, developed by the graduate students, is called LineDrive.)

Tversky’s fellow traveler in much of her work has been Pat Hanrahan (adviser to Agrawala and Stolte), described by one of his colleagues as the world’s best when it comes to visualization. Hanrahan, the Canon USA Professor in the School of Engineering, has twice been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) for scientific and techni-cal achievements in digital imaging. He says he “builds tools,” which include rendering software and graphics hardware that transform vast amounts of data into vi-sualizations. Both Simbios and the Institute for Com-putational and Mathematical Engineering (see articles, page 5) consult with Hanrahan, who was trained as a biophysicist.

“I was always interested in scientific visualization, see HCI, Page 10

researchers from beyond. Kembel is an expert in idea generation and prototyping and—no surprise—has a bit of entrepreneurship in his background as well.

“Stanford was unique in balancing mechanical engi-neering and art,” he said. “Most places emphasized one or the other. People here learned to reconcile the differences and create a more human experience. The products were essentially foils to teach students to be more human-centered.”

Essentially, there was a shift from design to design thinking, from products to experience. The idea is that any problem can be approached from an experiential, observational, hands-on manner. Watch and listen, fig-ure out the problem, then solve it.

The design people have had plenty of opportunities to put this into practice close to home, as they have moved three times already and are looking forward to two more moves before finally landing in the Peterson Building (next to Mitchell Earth Sciences) in 2009. Each time is an opportunity to prototype themselves, Kembel said.

The Birch module, the d.school’s previous home, was windowless, cramped and messy, though with

a certain charm. They turned the space around four times, Kembel said. In December they decamped to Sweet Hall, where they have far more room, and the process continues, defining space with movable furniture, whiteboards on wheels and what appear to be transparent shower curtains marking off study and meeting areas. Treating space as if it was a product or device to satisfy human needs, they’re “prototyping [their] way to the new building,” in Kembel’s words.

In charge of the latest move (and glad it’s over) was Scott Doorley, one of three design fellows this year. The one-year fellowship program follows a master’s degree, which in Doorley’s case was in the School of Education’s Learning, Design and Technology program.

Doorley was on his way to a life in human-computer interaction (see article above) when he veered a bit, courtesy of design thinking. His focus is more on the human end of HCI than on the computer end. For him, “it’s about mediation, how people interpret things when they’re experiencing them.” In other words, he’s more interested in the human than in the computer.

“I’m interested in process and purpose,” he said, “and that’s why I came to Stanford. I felt so relieved

when I got here because there are lots of people working on creating things—models, techniques, sys-tems—to help people communicate. It’s happening all over campus.”

Fellow Sarah Stein Greenberg also sees design thinking as a form of mediation.

“The way I’m wired, I’ve always been drawn to the interface between different worlds,” she said.

While earning her Stanford MBA and preparing to wear a business hat in the world of social advocacy (she had previously worked at Planned Parenthood), Greenberg came across Jim Patell’s course Entrepre-neurial Design for Extreme Affordability. That led her to the d.school and, eventually, to small rural farms in Southeast Asia.

“I saw immediately they were using the vocabulary I had been seeking all this time,” she said. “It’s very user-centered; you get your words and ideas from the people who are affected. I always thought projects had to be complete, finished; prototyping was new to me.”

Following Patell’s class, Greenberg spent six weeks working with farmers in Southeast Asia to figure out

see DesIgN, page 11

Scott Klemmer, co-director of the

Human-Computer Interaction group,

works with a class on writing a profile

of a make-believe student who is inter-

acting with the software designed by

the group.

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� WINTER 2007

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CourteSy Chand John, Frank C. anderSon and SCott delP

Numbers

Biomechanics

researchers are

using simula-

tions of gait to

quantify how

individual mus-

cles contribute

to an observed

movement.

the most basic building blocks

WINTER 2007 5

You may not know it, but it is likely you need the services of a compu-tational mathematician. Lucky for you, you’re at Stanford.

The Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) was launched in 2005 after several previous incarnations. Said

its director, Peter Glynn, “It’s almost hard to think of a part of the university that is not impacted by computa-tional math.”

Engineering has always had two pillars: theory and experimentation. Computational mathematics—the result of the dizzying increase in computers’ ability to compute—has now created a third pillar, uniting the other two. Modeling and simulation are now possible to such a degree that they play a role equal to that of theoretical math and hands-on experimentation.

“We’re interdisciplinary; we do research that’s us-able and that creates links between engineering and math,” said Margot Gerritsen, a faculty member in the School of Earth Sciences who is on ICME’s steering committee. “So it’s not that we’re spreading out; we reach out. We’re almost like a service department.”

It was in that spirit that Gerritsen worked with stu-dents to set up a Computational Consulting website (http://icme.stanford.edu/consulting/csquared/). Ques-tions come from all over: graduate students, professors, industry professionals, even the Library of Congress. Consultations also can be face-to-face, said third-year students Jeremy Kozdon and David Gleich, who pointed out that they don’t always solve people’s prob-lems, they mostly just put them on the right track.

ICME’s origins lie in the Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics (SCCM) program, which began in 1988. The story is not a simple one. The De-partment of Computer Science (CS) at Stanford was founded in 1965 by people who were primarily math-ematicians. At that time, there were few CS depart-ments in the country, and graduate students came from a variety of disciplines. Over time, CS as a discipline grew closer to electrical engineering than to mathemat-ics, as a result of which the department moved into the School of Engineering in 1986.

“Originally,” said Walter Murray, professor of man-agement science and engineering, “computers were de-signed and used by mathematicians to compute. But at some point, computer science became a subject in and of itself, devoted to the essence of the computer, and math was no longer a big part of its core. So, non-CS people were coming to Stanford to study computational math in the Computer Science Department, where they faced comprehensive exams in subjects such as hard-ware and artificial intelligence in which they had little interest and no knowledge.”

In other words, he said, Stanford was losing gradu-

ate students who wanted to focus on computational mathematics. So SCCM was established in large part as a place where graduates from a variety of disciplines could study. For over a decade, the program produced stellar master’s and doctoral students.

But according to Murray, it was always a struggle. The program relied mainly on faculty volunteers and it was under-funded, a challenge to even a mathemati-cian.

So John Hennessy, who at the time was dean of the School of Engineering, formed a committee to figure out a long-term solution. Several were proposed, in-cluding folding the program back into CS. An appendix to the committee’s report, written by Murray, proposed that computational mathematics form a department of its own in which the teaching of mathematics to en-gineers at both the graduate and undergraduate levels would be added to the research agenda of SCCM. The idea found support among a broad range of faculty members, and, after conversations with Hennessy’s successor as dean, Jim Plummer, SCCM was disbanded in 2004-05 and morphed into ICME.

Engineering’s backboneEveryone involved in the process agreed that the in-

“Bringing it together” is a phrase

often used by the people in charge

of Simbios (Simulation of Biological

Structures), one of Stanford’s two

centers for biomedical computation

funded by the National Institutes

of Health (NIH). Their goal is to

bring quantitative and life sciences

together; specifically, to use phys-

ical and mathematical modeling

to create computerized simula-

tions of biological structures

and functions.

Those are two pretty differ-

ent worlds. One of Simbios’

two principal investigators,

Russ Altman, says readily

that “being at the Clark Cen-

ter was critical to making

this happen.” The fact that

computer scientists

and geneti-

cists and

engineers and biologists were all in the

same space—the James H. Clark Center,

home to Bio-X and the Department of

Bioengineering—made grant-writing and,

later, research possible, he said.

Scott Delp, Simbios’ co-PI agreed,

adding, “The strength we have

in biology, mechanics and com-

puter science makes interdisci-

plinary science work.”

“Simbios is truly interdisci-

plinary,” said executive director

Jeanette Schmidt. “It doesn’t

always come easy, defining

which components of a biological prob-

lem can be tackled by computation. We

really try to bring it all together though.

The art is to find the place where com-

putation is most useful and needed and

might not be obvious.”

Schmidt said she, Altman and Delp

inhabit that middle area on the spectrum

between mathematics and biology.

“Scientists already are different crea-

tures than they were 10 years ago,” she

said. “They have to be trained in other

disciplines. But it will always be critical to

have biologists in their wet labs, people

in the middle and people who are purely

computational. You need all

three for good interdisciplin-

ary research.

“Not every biologist needs

to be trained in computation,”

she added. “But computation

will infiltrate their labs one

way or another. You can’t

imagine a biology lab anymore without a

computer.”

It was that necessary juxtaposition that

inspired the National Institutes of Health

in 2004 to begin funding the biomedical

computation centers under its Roadmap

Initiative. Simbios was among the first

batch of four; a second group of three

came later, including Stanford’s National

Center for Biomedical Ontology.

Simbios’ specific mission falls under

the NIH’s “New Pathways to Discovery”

theme, aimed at building a better toolbox.

It includes bioinformatics, computational

biology, imaging, structural biology and

nanomedicine. At Simbios, the computa-

tional focus is on simulation of structural

motions; at other NIH centers computa-

tion might mean simulating the immune

system or a pandemic or making sense

of vast amounts of data derived from

complex experiments.

Chand John, a doctoral student in

computer science, started off in com-

puter graphics, but two years ago he

joined Delp’s lab to work on neuromuscu-

lar biomechanics. John’s objective is to

create algorithms to enable simulations

of human movement so that doctors

can better assess problems and medical

solutions.

“The ultimate achievement,” he said,

Quantifying the body

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

l.a. CiCero

Jeremy Kozden, below left and colleague

David Gleich, who both had interdisciplin-

ary undergraduate careers, are among

the ICME graduate students working on

the Computational Consulting website.

One of their biggest projects thus far was

helping the Library of Congress with a

massive digitization project.

l.a. CiCero

see ICMe, page 8

see sIMBIOs, page 8

Jeanette Schmidt

6 WINTER 2007

When Engineering Dean Jim Plummer was asked recently to predict the hottest new field, the uncharted territory just ahead, he didn’t take but a second to reply.

“Nano,” he said. “It’s a sea change.”

Nanotechnology, by which certain physical and chem-ical operations enable mastery over unbelievably tiny structures, which in turn can benefit everything from medicine to sportswear, is occupying the time of a grow-ing number of Stanford researchers. The university has two principal facilities. The Stanford Nanocharacteriza-tion Laboratory, launched in October 2005, is in the Ge-balle Laboratory for Advanced Materials. The Stanford Nanofabrication Facility (SNF), whose lab members work in a 10,500-square-foot clean room surrounded by observation windows, is in the Paul Allen CIS Building.

“These places are very expensive to run, so people from various fields converge on them,” Plummer said. “Physics, chemistry, engineering all use them. The labs are like cafes; people go there to accomplish some-thing. They have the same magic.”

But while nanotechnology is a technically exciting domain of inquiry with enormous potential, its possible effects on society are a focus of persistent controversy.

In 2003 the National Science Foundation announced a competition to establish a network of nanotechnol-ogy facilities that would be open to academic, industrial and government researchers. SNF, together with labs at 12 other universities, submitted an application. The agency required that each proposal indicate how the group would address the “social and ethical implica-tions of nanotechnology.” To help formulate that part of the proposal, SNF invited Professor (Teaching) Robert McGinn, of the Management Science and Engineering Department, to get involved, and he proposed carrying

out a detailed empirical study of what researchers at the 13 labs thought about ethics and research.

Ultimately, that proposal won the competition, and in 2004, SNF became part of the 13-node National Nano-technology Infrastructure Network (NNIN).

After working for about a year with other researchers at SNF, McGinn finalized a questionnaire for an online survey titled “Ethics and Nanotechnology: Mapping the Views of the NNIN Community.” It was accessible to researchers from September 2005 to July 2006.

The most important of McGinn’s results, in his view, is that it appears that most researchers (professors, engi-neers, scientists, postdoctoral scholars and graduate stu-dents) believe they have an ethical responsibility to antic-ipate the impact of their scientific work. In other words, they have a responsibility not only to ensure that they themselves cause no harm, but also to alert authorities if they think applications of their work might pose risks

down the line. This, McGinn said, could well indicate a paradigm shift.

His other principal takeaway point is that it is up to managers to take responsibility for the safety and ethical culture of their labs. In somewhat contradictory fashion, a majority of researchers said their col-leagues probably would not intervene

if someone were taking shortcuts, though a large major-ity (77 percent) also disagreed with the proposition that their only responsibility is to follow lab safety rules.

These matters are of such concern in the field of nan-otechnology, as opposed to other technologies, because the enormous projected benefits conceivably conceal substantial ills. The fact that a new nanomaterial ex-hibits a particular property that is safe on the macro or micro scale in no way guarantees that the same material will exhibit the same property at the nanoscale.

That understanding led the National Science Foun-dation to issue its request for proposals; it also led the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering to recommend in 2004 that consider-

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‘You can’t calculate ethical issues,’ McGinn said.

NaNotechNologyAnd

ethics

In the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility,

research and development engineer

James Conway, left, trains graduate

students John Liu and Paul Leu on an

ultra-high resolution ebeam lithography

machine.

WINTER 2007 �

ation of ethical and social implications of nanotechnol-ogy form part of all researchers’ training.

McGinn’s survey garnered 1,037 responses (90 of them from Stanford), or about one-quarter of the total number of researchers—a sample he calls “robust but not random.” Eighty percent of respondents were men and about two-thirds were U.S. citizens. He divided the questionnaire into three categories: general beliefs about ethics and nanotechnology; specific ethical issues in the lab; and experiences and beliefs about the study of ethics in general.

Half the respondents either somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement that “there are significant ethical issues related to nanotechnology,” and 27 per-cent somewhat or strongly disagreed. When asked to compare the importance of the ethical dimension of the nanotech field with its scientific dimension, 43 percent said they were equally important. However, far fewer ranked ethics more important than science (8 percent) than the reverse (49 percent). When asked how inter-ested they are in ethical issues related to nanotech, 39 percent said they are quite or very interested; just 6 per-cent said they are not at all interested.

Respondents were then presented with specific sce-narios that might play out in their labs and asked to state the degree to which they were ethical or unethical. For instance, if a researcher never before involved in an accident planned to carry out a procedure that was po-tentially hazardous, 93 percent of the respondents said they believe it would be completely or somewhat un-ethical for that researcher not to inform fellow bench workers. However, the disapprobation declined regard-ing the researcher’s obligation to consult scholarly liter-ature beforehand (72 percent thought the omission was unethical) or to inform administrators (37 percent).

Regarding a situation in which a researcher takes “a relatively safe, time-saving shortcut,” researchers were asked what the most likely response would be in their lab. In other words, respondents were asked not what they would do but rather what everyone else would do. Around one-fifth said the individual would be reported

to lab management, while 44 percent said colleagues would try to persuade the individual to stop taking the shortcut.

One-quarter said no one would do anything, which is what led McGinn to assert that managers have a responsi-bility to prevent what he calls a “laissez-faire culture.”

Seventy-seven percent disagreed with the idea that fol-lowing the rules is one’s only ethical responsibility; on the other side, 44 respondents (4 percent of the total) strongly agreed with the statement: “The only ethical responsibil-ity of a researcher at a [nanotech] lab is to follow labora-tory rules.”

It’s a tiny percentage, McGinn noted—though it is somewhat higher at Stanford—but it is clear that all re-searchers do not hold similar beliefs about the relationship of ethics and unsafe lab behavior. Asked if they believe ethical guidelines are necessary for nanotech research, 59 percent nationwide said yes, but the number at Stanford was just 50 percent. Those who said guidelines were “nei-ther necessary nor desirable” was 7 percent nationwide and 12 percent at Stanford.

The survey also asked researchers about their obliga-tion beyond the laboratory walls to anticipate ethical is-sues and to alert appropriate parties of potential danger. Two-thirds agreed that researchers “should always strive to anticipate ethical issues” (6 percent strongly disagreed), and 76 percent strongly agreed that researchers have the responsibility to alert others of danger (4 percent strongly disagreed).

Researchers also were asked how morally acceptable three nanotech goals are to them: Eighty-five percent said cleaning the environment with nanotech is quite or very morally acceptable; three-quarters said repairing dam-aged human body parts is; and 35 percent said increasing human mental abilities is. But 18 percent said the latter category—enhancement—is morally unacceptable.

Turning to the field of ethics in general, McGinn asked all respondents if they had ever taken an ethics course. Thirty-four percent said yes, though U.S. citizens scored slightly higher than non-citizens. Thirty-six percent said they had taken a course in which ethical issues closely re-lated to science, technology and/or engineering were dis-cussed. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—77 percent said they were somewhat, quite or very willing to spend time learning about the ethical issues related to nanotech-nology, and two-thirds said they should become a standard part of the education of future engineers and scientists.

In general, the numbers for Stanford mirror the na-tional numbers, with some exceptions.

Among McGinn’s principal conclusions are that re-spondents believe quite strongly that it is important for ethical issues to be considered but are themselves only moderately interested; they believe themselves inad-equately informed about ethical issues and want them incorporated into curricula; they need a better grasp of what constitutes ethical judgment, negligence and action; and they believe researchers have ethical responsibilities to society. Their notion of what constitutes “harm” is amorphous, he said, yet he took heart in the number who believe that researchers must anticipate the ethical conse-quences of their work.

“Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors,” Albert Einstein said in 1931. “Never forget this amidst all your diagrams and equations.” This admonition is one of Mc-Ginn’s favorites, and he often ends his engineering ethics presentations with it.

“Engineers and engineering students like formulas,” McGinn said. “But you can’t calculate ethical issues. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for mature, inde-pendent judgment. I hope the results of this survey make a modest contribution to fostering exactly that.”

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

l.a. CiCero

Most researchers appear to believe they have an ethical responsibility to anticipate the impact of

their work.

NaNotechNology

Robert McGinn, a professor in the

Management Science and Engineering

Department, coordinated an empirical

study of what researchers at 13 labs

thought about ethics and nanotech

research.

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8 WINTER 2007

“would be if a surgeon could record the motion of a

patient with a movement disorder, use our software to

determine what muscles are misbehaving in

that patient, simulate how different surgeries

would alter the patient’s movement and suc-

cessfully decide which surgery would best

improve that patient’s movement.”

Simbios’ principal contribution is an

easy-to-use, open-source simulation toolkit,

SimTK, which allows biomedical computa-

tion to be integrated across laboratories and disci-

plines. Until now, such software was being developed in

a multitude of what amounted to cottage industries, and

one was often incompatible with another.

All the NIH centers have a computational core, but

“to keep the computation honest,” Schmidt said, they

also must focus on specific biological problems that

can be addressed by computation. In the case of Sim-

bios, the four problems are neuromuscular dynamics,

cardiovascular dynamics, myosin

dynamics and RNA folding.

One of the bioengineering gradu-

ate students working on RNA struc-

ture prediction in Altman’s lab is

Magda Jonikas, and she got there

precisely because she saw it as a

way of bringing it all together. She

started off in protein and tissue engineering but missed

the math. In Altman’s lab, using physics-based methods

and informatics, she gets not only the math but the

Simbios community as well.

“Working in Simbios has been a great experience

so far, not just because I find the goals of the program

interesting, but also because of the community of

people,” she said.

Simbios’ home is the Department of Bioengineering,

a pioneer in its own right, belonging to both

the School of Engineering and the School of

Medicine. Simbios depends on the depart-

ment mostly for lodging and administrative

support (its funding comes entirely from the

NIH), but the proximity has certainly created

good synergy, Altman said.

Thinking back to the birth of the Bioen-

gineering Department, Engineering Dean Jim Plummer

shook his head.

“Three years ago, if you had asked, how can we

make this work, we’d have put together a list of prob-

lems so long you couldn’t imagine it,” Plummer said.

inter action MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

tellectual integrity of computational math called for a degree of institutional independence.

“Computational math’s importance to modern engi-neering has increased incredibly in recent years,” said Gerritsen, whose Stanford PhD is in SCCM. “Break-throughs in engineering often originate with mathe-matical modeling, with fundamental breakthroughs in computational math. It is the backbone of computer-based engineering. You can see it in advances in bio-engineering, the development of new tools for surgery, in visualization, in modeling medical problems. There’s a symbiosis between pure and applied math, and at ICME we strive to safeguard the math.”

Gerritsen is a faculty member in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, which loans her out to ICME every fall to teach CME 200, a course on matrix algorithms for graduate students in engineering and earth sciences. She is an expert in fluid mechanics in

subsurface oil reserves, specifically in enhanced oil re-covery, which means more efficient and ecological ways of getting oil out of the ground. To do that, she creates models of the fluid flow in underground oil deposits.

Many members of the engineering faculty teach ICME courses, said Glynn, the Thomas W. Ford Pro-fessor in the School of Engineering. Some take on ex-tra classes, while others do it within their normal load. (Like all interdisciplinary programs at Stanford, ICME cross-lists its courses.) Plummer “is very aware that this problem needs to be addressed,” Glynn said, add-ing that he hoped a mechanism can be found to allow faculty, including those from the School of Humanities and Sciences (home to the Statistics and Mathemat-ics departments), to get full credit for teaching ICME courses.

But on the other hand, he said, there are advantages to the institute’s in-between position.

“Computational math at Stanford is quite unique,” he said. “We take advantage of what the university is good at. And as an institute, we have the ability to take advantage of our strengths in many, many depart-ments. The asset here is the recognition that computa-tional math cuts across so many parts of the university. An entity like ours has the potential to be flexible and rapidly adapt to the new applications that drive the dis-cipline.”

As with other interdisciplinary centers or institutes at Stanford, leaders envision themselves somehow serv-ing every part of the university and thus do not neces-sarily wish to be confined to one school. Thus Glynn, whose operations research PhD is from Stanford, is thinking very broadly.

“We want to be the go-to place,” he said. “The biggest challenge is how to reach everyone, and we’re working hard to address that. Right now it’s mostly by word of mouth, but a year or two from now we’ll be further along.”

Gerritsen thinks in similar terms, saying her dream is that ICME develop into something along the lines of the Woods Institute for the Environment, a place with links to virtually every department and discipline on campus.

The question of billetsIn fact, when ICME got off the ground, it stepped

right into the vanguard at Stanford with a plan for split billets similar to those at the Woods Institute.

When ICME’s first director, Charbel Farhat, arrived at Stanford from the University of Colorado, he was supposed to have an appointment split between ICME and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. How-ever, things turned out differently.

“We considered very carefully the appointment of joint faculty between institute and department,” Plum-mer said. “It had never been done before. But there was pushback at all levels, and eventually we said, it’s just too hard. Stanford still hadn’t figured out how to do that. So we backed away.”

Though the Woods Institute ended up being the pio-neer of joint billets, “we had tested the waters,” Plum-mer said. “They took our idea of joint appointments and said, ‘We’ll try it.’”

As with many good ideas, ICME’s plan foundered on its novelty. The split billets vanished, and the in-stitute’s leaders put their energy elsewhere, which they say is reaping excellent results.

One of the petroleum engineer Margot

Gerritsen’s previous projects involved

developing a computer code capable

of tracking massive internal waves that

begin on the ocean floor.

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Simbioscont inued from page 5

Scott Delp Russ Altman

ICMEcontinued from page 5

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“Stanford is transitioning toward an interdisciplin-ary model of teaching and research, and at some point we’ll have the mechanisms for making these appoint-ments,” Glynn said. “In the meantime, we are focusing on building a world-class program that fully leverages all the opportunities that already exist here.”

For Gerritsen, “the most important thing is to show we can create a research vision. At the moment, we’re going for very big research grants that will allow us to attract more researchers. Later on, we can return to the billeting discussion.”

The institute has around 35 affiliated faculty mem-bers. They hail from computer science, mechanical engineering, energy resources, mathematics, statistics, aeronautics and astronautics, electrical engineering, civil engineering and management science. As Glynn said, there are few areas that couldn’t benefit from the assistance of a computational mathematician, and the field embraces such disparate areas as national security and ports, fluid dynamics and public policy.

“Every discipline has what physicists call the ‘grand challenge problems,’ and our faculty work on those,” Glynn said. “Since the advent of the computer, the human imagination has been highly creative in devel-oping new problem structures that require ever more computational ability. To address those problems, we need high-end expertise.”

The students who choose to enter such a dynamic, challenging and extensive field are, to quote Murray, “terrific.” ICME has around 100 graduate students in the master’s and doctoral programs. This year’s crop of around 25 master’s students come from eight countries and have backgrounds in bioengineering, computer sci-ence, physics, applied math and aerospace.

“Because ICME addresses a much wider range of is-sues than engineering departments, students must be protected in the first and second year,” Murray said. “They need more time to figure out what they’re do-ing. We don’t want them to arrive here knowing what they want to do.”

Kozdon, one of the students who operates Compu-tational Consulting, studied physics and computer sci-ence as an undergraduate. He said that when he got his bachelor’s degree he did not know of a graduate pro-gram that would allow him to continue in both fields. By chance, he saw a journal article that mentioned Stanford’s new program.

“It’s tailored for the non-mathematicians, aimed more at engineers, scientists, economists,” he said. “And because we’re an institute, not a department, I can work with anyone. We don’t have to work for af-filiated faculty. That’s the biggest appeal, the number of opportunities to do what I want.”

His colleague, David Gleich, had studied math and computer science, and he, too, wanted to keep doing both. Again, ICME allowed him to do so.

The institute’s leaders say they are very grateful for the generosity of the School of Engineering in making fellowships and other resources available to the incom-ing graduate students. But at some point, Glynn ac-knowledged, they’ll have to find alternative funding.

Building a large tool setThe financial protection for the students is essential.

Right off the bat they are exposed to a multitude of concepts and courses, many of which may be entirely new to them. This year’s 10 incoming doctoral stu-

dents all share one large office and, Glynn said, within a few weeks were working on problems together de-spite coming from different fields.

“At the basic level, they have the same skills, but it’s easier to learn as a group,” Murray commented.

The core courses cut across every methodological discipline, he added, and all their students can address a wide range of applied problems and know which of their many tools is the most appropriate. There are eight application areas, including aeronautics, com-puter science, mechanical engineering, statistics and a miscellaneous grab bag that reflects the rapidly chang-ing nature of the field.

“We think they’ll be facing far more complicated problems in the future; the easy problems have all been solved,” Murray said. “The larger the number of models you’re exposed to, the more you can do. We give them a broad set of ideas so they’re equipped to find the appropriate concepts for applied problems. As they say, if you have a hammer, every problem is a nail. The larger your tool set, the bigger the picture of the world.”

ICME eventually will be on the ground floor of the new Engineering Center, symbolizing, Murray said, its usefulness to everyone. It is not yet clear which of the ICME faculty members will leave their current homes to move into the new building, but not all the core fac-ulty will be able to move, Glynn said.

“Co-location is important, of course, but on the other hand, we have more than 30 affiliated faculty, plus all the loosely affiliated people, and we want to maintain that broad interaction among many people,” he said.

Aside from deciding where Stanford faculty will be located, the ICME leadership is working out the the-matic research agenda for the coming years, which will also draw on visiting scholars.

“We envision that people will work together over a one- or two-year period, with focused talks and courses, and then they’ll disperse and take the knowl-edge back to their homes,” Glynn said. “This is a very exciting opportunity; people could change their entire research orientation on the basis of these encounters. Imagine a full year of meeting with people from biol-ogy, or wherever, and getting a complete understand-ing of the interface between the disciplines, and con-sequently reorienting one’s research. It would be like a mini-sabbatical.”

Such an opportunity, he pointed out, would be along the lines of what the Commission on Graduate Education proposed in its 2005 report as a means for encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration. Indeed, Mark Horowitz, associate vice provost for graduate programs, suggested to the Faculty Senate in Novem-ber that one of the next interdisciplinary summer insti-tutes be devoted to computational math.

Making connectionsMathematician Gunnar Carlsson, who is affiliated

with ICME, said he, for one, would embrace such a possibility. Thinking back on his own serendipitous path to engineering, he said he was lucky in knowing people who knew people.

“These things happen at Stanford because the atmo-sphere is good, but they happen at random. The ques-tion is, can we do more in a formal way? I think the [graduate] commission’s recommendations for faculty

“It would have seemed unsolvable. But [Medical School

Dean] Phil Pizzo and I said, we don’t know the answers,

but we’ll solve them one by one. And we’ve worked on

these problems, one by one, and there are solutions. It’s

not rocket science.”

Rocket science appears to be one of the few things

Altman, Delp and Schmidt do not have training in.

Altman’s degrees are in biochemistry, medicine and

medical information sciences, though he teaches in the

departments of Genetics and Bioengineering. Schmidt

has a PhD in computer science, is self-taught in biology

and spent years at a major biotech company. While

Delp’s degrees are in mechanical engineering, he was

the first chair of Bioengineering. Today they all—along

with colleagues in biology, computer science, math-

ematics, chemistry and a multitude of medical special-

ties, most obviously surgery—are essentially creating a

new research arena.

One of the NIH mandates is that the centers dissemi-

nate their research. Simbios does so in stunning fashion

with Biomedical Computation Review, a quarterly with

the motto “Diverse disciplines, one community.”

A recent article in the journal reported that there are

now some 60 undergraduate, graduate and certificate

programs in the United States offering some version of

biomedical computing, with training in both computation

and life sciences.

As the field matures, central questions will be how to

train and teach a field that is a composite, and how to

deal with the spectrum of disciplines.

Referring to the familiar Stanford d.school metaphor

of the T-shaped scholar (with horizontal breadth and ver-

tical depth), Delp said the Bioengineering Department

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

‘As they say, if you have a hammer, every problem is a nail. The larger your tool set, the bigger the picture

of the world,’ Murray said.

Images of slices of the abdominal aorta under

varying degrees of stress due to exercise.

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CourteSy SimbioS

10 WINTER 2007

inter action MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

how people envision math and how mathematicians can share their information,” he said. “If you think historically, you see techniques that we think are ob-vious, but they weren’t; they took forever. Bar charts, for example, started being used only 150 years ago.” Tversky too points out that “metaphorically visible” vi-sualizations such as pie charts were late arrivals.

Hanrahan says he uses graphical techniques to con-vey information or support reasoning. His collabora-tors include psychologists, engineers, physicians, math-ematicians and physicists. All those people need to visualize their data and their concepts; computers can make that happen, but someone has to ensure that the results make sense to humans and respond to the ques-tions they’re asking.

Of course, different people ask different questions. As Tversky might say, they have different mental repre-sentations of space.

“The way you picture things depends on the ques-tions you ask,” Hanrahan said. “So that’s an HCI point of view, trying to help people solve specific prob-lems, not just make cool pictures. We build tools.”

The flexible definition of HCI means that different universities house it in different ways. HCI is a degree-granting institute within Carnegie Mellon’s computer sci-ence school; a subgroup within Berkeley’s department of electri-cal engineering and computer sciences; a nucleus of courses within MIT’s Media Lab; and a degree-grant-ing program sitting between the School of Psychology, the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

Artificial intelligenceOne of Klemmer’s closest faculty associates in the

HCI group is Terry Winograd, artificial intelligence pioneer, founder of Computer Pro-fessionals for Social Responsibil-ity and adviser to untold numbers of students who have gone off and changed the world. His shift from artificial intelligence to HCI and design was as much a philosophical one as a mechanical one, he said.

“Design and research are two ways of thinking,” he said. “With research you ask, which is the faster mouse? And you can test it. But with design, experience is what’s important. You can’t be precise about that, you can’t measure it. You have to meet needs that are not well specified. An old person will just say, ‘I want this computer to help me.’ So you learn by talking, observing, watching.”

Computers may have been getting smarter a few de-cades ago, Winograd said, but they weren’t getting any easier to use. They were not meeting those ill-specified but nonetheless crucial human needs.

He was not alone in his observation. The Depart-ment of Mechanical Engineering began making insti-tutional moves decades ago in recognition of design deficits; down the road, those changes would lead to the establishment of the Design Institute. At the same time, the Computer Science Department, which moved out of the School of Humanities and Sciences and into the School of Engineering in 1986, began looking at the “why” instead of just the “how” of computing.

Two new concepts began attaining prominence: ubiquity and empathy. By 1990, when the HCI group was formed, computers were no longer bulky things sitting on desks. They were small and mobile, and their technology was not even confined to artifacts called

HCIcont inued from page 3

sabbaticals for cross-training is a fantastic idea. But we need to identify people and put them together with the right people. You can’t just browse ideas; you need focused browsing, you need people who can tell you what the important problems are.”

It is the usefulness of ICME that faculty members and directors return to continually, which gives them confidence that the program can only grow.

“It’s like computer science,” Gerritsen said. “At first it was not its own department either, but today, everyone knows it’s its own discipline. There are some people who say, ‘We’re engineers, we can develop com-putational algorithms ourselves, we don’t need that research.’ I ask them, ‘Why do we have a CS depart-ment? Everyone knows how to run a computer, how to write programs. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need

a CS department to do the basic research.” ICME pro-vides that basic research function, she said.

“At other universities, students sort of understand; they sort of apply. But we guarantee that Stanford will always have a good selection of fundamental courses at a very advanced level and that our students will be able to develop their own computational algorithms.”

Carlsson’s research direction took a decisive turn as a result of ICME. For a decade or so, he had been working on a pure problem regarding topology. He sensed there must be some application for the work, but he was unable to figure it out. Speaking about the problem one day to a friend in statistics, the friend rec-ommended someone in psychology, who in turn sug-gested someone in computer science, and Carlsson was introduced to the world of computational math.

“I had been dreaming of this project for 15 years,” he said, “but it wasn’t until I spoke to people from engineering that I realized what it was about, what it could mean.”

ICMEcontinued from page 9

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Barbara Tversky

Terry Winograd

Zoe, the “robotic astrobiologist,” works in

the Atacama desert in Chile for a group of

researchers in Pittsburgh.

CourteSy Pamela hindS

thus far has concentrated on breadth. As new courses

are developed (a process that entails a good deal of

hard work and modesty, Delp said, as not every field

can be deemed essential core material), the vertical will

gain in importance.

“We can bring math and theory to biology pre-

cisely because we have such disciplinary strengths

at Stanford,” Altman said. “The departments are the

underpinning of Simbios. And Clark was the most

important thing.”

As for the disciplinary spectrum at places such as

Simbios, John provides a geometric correction.

“It’s much more than a spectrum,” he said. “I think

of it as a tetrahedron, a pyramid with a triangle as its

base. The three vertices of the base triangle represent

life sciences, mathematics and computation. The

fourth vertex, which lies above the triangle, represents

generality.”

Simbioscont inued from page 9

‘You can’t just browse ideas; you need focused

browsing, you need people who can tell you what the important problems are,’

Carlsson said.

WINTER 2007 11

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

“computers.” Chips and handhelds and GPS devices began showing up in the most unexpected locations. It was the start of the era of ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, defined by Klemmer as “technology that sup-ports embodied cognition and that is integrated into everyday life.”

And with ubiquity comes the recognition that all people in all places at all times might require or benefit from technology and therefore have to be able to use it in a productive and enjoyable way. Enter the social scientists.

As Pamela Hinds, associate professor of manage-ment science and engineering (MSE) says, “It’s very easy for people to design things for people similar to themselves.” Most people, however, are not like com-puter engineers.

Hinds, who has a PhD in organizational science and management, is co-director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization in MSE. Just as many HCI experts work on the interface between technology and individual users, people in Hinds’ field work on the effects of technology on groups and teams.

Here the question is not just how a technology af-fects a user, but how it affects workers’ ability to com-municate with and understand each other, often at a distance. The disciplinary underpinnings of such work can be found in the behavioral sciences: anthropology, sociology, communication and psychology.

As an example, Hinds is working with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon on a human-robot project that links Chile to Pittsburgh. In the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile, a four-wheeled, solar-powered ro-botic astrobiologist named Zoë goes about picking up biological and geological data for a group of scien-tists in Pittsburgh. For several years, Hinds’ team has been observing both ends of the conversation to track the inevitable missed signals and misunderstandings, which are as much behavioral or cognitive issues as technical ones.

Essentially, robots have to be trained to be more perceptive about humans and to provide enough con-textual information to the scientists so that the latter are able to form sound conclusions. In Hinds’ words, the robots have to be “creative communicators.” They have to know what to say and when to say it.

In this study, Hinds relies on common ground the-ory, which social scientists use to assess the chances of successful collaboration. In this case, Hinds’ team reported, “the interactive process … was problematic.” Just as a human being needs to know what another person’s knowledge, attitudes and expectations are in order to have a fruitful conversation, so too with ro-bots.

Sharing knowledgeIn a similar fashion, certain technologies may enable

humans to share knowledge, not just in the technical sense of moving a file from one place to another but in the sense of generosity or inspiration. These matters are addressed by the subfield of HCI called computer-supported cooperative work, which is Hinds’ special-ization. Groupware, social bookmarking, blogs and wikis are all examples.

Jan Chong, one of the students in the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, for example, is examining two software development teams; the mem-bers of one are all in the same space, while the mem-bers of the other are dispersed. She is interested in the degree to which technology helps them share knowl-edge. Beyond the technical aspects, she is interested in

the ways in which people conceive of knowledge-seeking.

“What is the best environment for people to seek knowledge in?” she asked. “We don’t really know.”

In a related vein, Kathy Lee, a second-year student in MSE, is looking at social bookmarking. (Lee has a master’s degree in HCI from the University of Michigan’s School of Information, formerly known as library science, where many HCI programs are housed.)

“Why do people share? Why not? How do people react to social pres-sure, to the knowledge that some-one else is close by?” she asked, referring to the online community created by social bookmarking. If you are part of this community, you can track the back-and-forth sug-gestions and annotations. If you see that someone benefited from one of your bookmarks, you may be more likely to give back, and Lee wants to measure that.

Chong and Lee describe themselves as inhabiting a space somewhere between computer science and the social sciences—and being very happy to be there, though aware of the difficulties.

Being on the job market, for example, which Chong is, means figuring out what other universities call this hybrid field. It might be computer science or informa-tion sciences or management sciences or business or HCI itself. The Chronicle of Higher Education lists jobs by schools or departments, not by field, so there is no efficient way to determine where the openings are. Chong finally did it backward, going to websites of de-partments that interested her, regardless of what they were called, and checking for openings.

“The biggest challenge is learning to speak everyone else’s language,” she said. “My work crosses so many disciplines, but translating that is really difficult. Some people say it’s too technical, other people say too orga-nizational.

“So you just have to highlight certain things, and suddenly everyone is interested. You have to orient people to see the interesting parts. It’s funny, because I see the whole picture. But when I talk about my work, I have to learn to say it’s A or it’s B or it’s C.”

Hinds considers herself fortunate to be in an engi-neering school. Most people who do similar work are in business schools and, for the purposes of evaluation, they publish mostly in business journals. Likewise, if she were in a sociology department (which she could be), she probably would publish in sociology journals.

“The real challenge,” observed Lee, “is when people say, ‘What is your work on?’ So you say, ‘It’s on this and on that.’”

“There’s tension inherent in any interdisciplinary field,” Chong agreed. “There are many perspectives about the end result. You wonder, where am I putting my eggs? There are tensions about the direction of the field, but it’s a good conversation.”

Bridging the worlds of the physical and the digital seems only natural to someone like Klemmer, who has worked in multiple disciplines since the beginning of his schooling.

“Perhaps civilization’s biggest screw-up came when René Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ separat-ing mind and body,” he said. What Descartes didn’t know is that it’s all happening in the interface.

their needs through design thinking, which allows the farmers themselves to be the ultimate arbiters. The irrigation device designed as a result of those conver-sations, plus a quarter’s worth of collaborative work, is today up and running.

Once she leaves Stanford she’ll be doing the same thing as a management consultant—relying on team thinking.

“Even teams with the best intentions disband without the fruits of their labor because they don’t know how to collaborate,” Kembel said. “They have different values; they speak different languages. Design thinking is a fan-tastic glue to bring people together, whether to solve problems in K-12 education or poverty in rural Burma or whatever other problem you have.

“Let’s spend time with the dollar-a-day farmers,

observe, discover their needs, generate big ideas, develop prototypes and then take them back to the farmers. Some fail, others are OK, and you might do a project 10 times.

“You fail early and often in order to later succeed.”The realization that design thinking could be good for

everyone was one of the impulses behind Adventures in Design Thinking, first co-taught in summer 2006 by Winograd, Roth and Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in the Man-agement Science and Engineering Department.

The course grew out of the Commission on Gradu-ate Education’s recommendations that graduate stu-dents be given opportunities to interact with colleagues and faculty members from different disciplines. The one-week, hands-on class drew 32 students from a broad range of departments and, according to Roth, “it was the best teaching experience I’ve ever had at Stanford or anywhere else”—and he has taught for

nearly 40 years.“I can assure you it was really interesting to see all

the different students talking about different ways of using fruit, the subject of that day’s project,” Associ-ate Vice Provost Mark Horowitz reported to the Fac-ulty Senate, not entirely seriously. Fruit, or wallets, or sketching, or telling stories or just about anything else can be a vehicle for teamwork and problem solving from the perspective of design thinking.

The students’ evaluations were at times ecstatic. Most said the course made them think differently about themselves and introduced them to people outside their field whom they otherwise never would have met. One said it was “life-affirming”; another said the course provided “life tools.” The response inspired the instruc-tors to plan a similar class this summer.

Kembel says design thinking literally changes lives.

He could be right.

Designcont inued from page 3

continued from previous pagel.a. CiCero

Pat Hanrahan, a professor in the Com-

puter Science Department, works with

scientists, engineers and physicians to

help them use visualizations to improve

their work, convey information and sup-

port reasoning.

Scott Klemmer, left, with Matt James

and Ryan Park, in Klemmer’s project-

based class, human-Computer interaction

design Studio.

l.a. CiCero

12 WINTER 2007

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Life can be interesting in an interdisciplin-ary program at Stanford. One minute you’re on the brink of extinction, and the next minute you’re increasing enrollments, getting course development grants, send-ing honors students off to great jobs and, in the words of at least one alumnus, sav-ing lives. Interesting lives can be a curse,

but in academia few would trade them for anything else.Science, Technology and Society (STS) was born in the

early 1970s, a pioneer followed by similar programs at universities around the country. It integrates the studies of science, technology, humanities and the social sciences to better understand the impact of science and technology on society. The notion that a complex world required an inter- and multidisciplinary approach has not lost currency in the intervening three decades.

“I feel like I am getting a liberal arts education for the 21st century,” said honors student Sarah Falck in her letter of support for the program’s most recent self-study. “I am learning about a wide range of issues, but the refreshing thing is that all of those issues are so relevant and imme-diate. I often feel that my courses and their subject matter are unfolding in real time and that I can read about my major in the New York Times.”

The program, which offers BA and BS degrees, is organized around a core of classes supplemented by a course of study designed by students in conjunc-tion with advisers. The very act of cre-ating a course of study teaches them about the inter-relatedness of things.

Interviews with students and a look at graduates’ letters of support show that, for many, STS was a welcome surprise arrived at after several quar-ters of trying to coexist with majors that were not the right fit.

Many said they loved science but didn’t want to be scientists. Others loved engineering but didn’t want to be engineers. They loved tech but couldn’t envision four years of quantitative work. They loved English but couldn’t let go of their fascination with numbers.

“I agonized over the course bulletin at the beginning of every quarter. Finding STS was a complete relief,” one gradu-ate said.

Program Director Robert McGinn says he is hopeful that STS’s degree-granting authority will be renewed this year for an extended time period. But the story of STS is in many ways a parable for interdisciplinary programs at Stanford in general. They provide innovative cross-cutting thinking that can be extremely valuable to students yet difficult to fit into an existing structure based on discipline-based knowledge.

In 1996, the School of Engineering declined to support the program’s renewal, citing an insufficient number of senior Academic Council members among its faculty. Students and some faculty members immediately protested STS’s imminent demise. Some 2,500 signatures were gathered, and the pro-gram was given a one-year reprieve in the School of Humani-ties and Sciences with additional resources, including funding for a senior program director. Although that search foun-dered, historian of science Paula Findlen assumed leadership, and she and McGinn managed to right the listing boat. The subsequent program review in 1999 earned the program the maximum eight years of new life.

Since 2003, McGinn, professor (teaching) of management science and engineering as well as of STS, has been sole direc-tor. (His course Ethics and Public Policy is cited by student after student as one of the most memorable classes of their undergraduate career.) The average number of graduates of the program since 2000 has been 24, about double the number in the 1990s. Students go on to get degrees in law, business or medicine; they work in science, policy or teach-ing; they start new companies or, disproportionately, work for Google.

This success aside, the troubles in the 1990s point to the chief vulnerability of any interdisciplinary program, which is the lack of faculty appointments. McGinn, who has a doctor-ate in philosophy and a master’s degree in mathematics, both from Stanford, devotes most of his time to the program. But the roughly 20 faculty members regularly associated with the program do not. Their first obligation is to their depart-ments.

A 1998 grant from the Harris Foundation has permitted STS to offer faculty grants for developing new STS courses, as a result of which 10 new courses have been offered, McGinn said. STS also sponsors a seminar series, whose December 2006 session, a jam-packed affair, drew faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates and visitors from economics, engineering, classics, ecology, communica-tions and history.

“Every Thanksgiving I have to re-explain my major to my parents, but the joke’s on them because I’m applying for jobs now, and there are lots of opportunities,” said Falck. “I’m looking everywhere. The major allows that. I shouted down

my parents, but now they think it’s cool. They’re lawyers, so I could argue with them.”

Junior Noah Weiss agrees that hunt-ing for jobs or internships does not seem to suffer because of the major.

“STS is great for interviews because most people don’t know what it is, and they’re interested in finding out more,” he said. “The one downside is some jobs are looking for specific majors, like computer science, and even though my skill set could match the job, my major can act as a prohibi-tive factor.”

Falck chose to design her own concentration, which is unusual. The existing concentrations for the BA degree are aesthetics, development,

history and philosophy, information and society, public policy, social change, and work and organizations.

Falck put together a concentration in symbolic systems that she felt combined the best of STS with the existing Program in Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary program focusing on the relationship between natural and artificial systems that represent, process and act on information. (Weiss also had considered majoring in symbolic systems.)

Her friend and fellow honors student Sofia Lombera is earning a BS in STS, which requires what the program calls “technical depth” in a particular field. In her case, the field is biology.

“I’m interested in the implications of science on society, so the program is a great fit,” she said. Lombera is from Mexico, where university degrees are very career-oriented, she said, so she often gets puzzled stares when she tells people what she is studying. It was her sister, who also went to Stanford, who first alerted her to the existence of STS.

“It’s flexible yet rigorous; it lets you decide what you like and lets you run with it,” she said.

Lombera, who is especially interested in technology trans-fer, is writing an honors thesis on the international dimen-sions of neuroethics and is applying to Stanford co-terminal degree programs in management science and engineering and in sociology.

Though the STS program’s existence outside traditional departmental boundaries can make things challenging at times, its location amid a matrix of scientific, quantita-tive, humanistic and social concerns seems exactly where it belongs.

“Most of my classes have a broad range of majors in them,” said Weiss, who would like one day to work at the intersection of technology, business and program design, either as a manager at a large company or running his own firm.

“Honestly, I don’t put much weight on what major some-one is,” said Weiss. “If they’re smart and get things done, then they are a great teammate.”

‘I often feel that my courses and their subject matter are unfolding in real time and that I can read about my major in the new york

times,’ Falck said.

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