PhD applicants
Join me at UCSD
Join me at UCSD
questions
What's your research?
Can we meet?
Grad & Post-Doc Applicants
Internships & RAs
Advising
HCI Courses
Recommendations
Orals Committee
Hire Students
Can we meet?
Grad & Post-Doc Applicants
Internships & RAs
Advising
HCI Courses
Recommendations
Orals Committee
Hire Students
contact
srk@cs.stanford edu
+1 650 723 3692
+1 650 723 3692
talks & travel
2013-08-12 · San Diego, CA
2013-09-04 · Providence, RI
2013-09-05 · Cambridge, MA
2013-09-16 · San Jose, CA
2013-09-20 · Wilmington, DE
2013-09-27 · Stanford, CA
2013-09-28 · Menlo Park, CA
2014-03-24 · Indianapolis, IN
phd students & post‑docs
Ranjitha Kumar
'13
Jesse Cirimele
'13
Nicolas Kokkalis
'13
...and formerly...
Neil Patel '11 (@Awaaz.De)
Steven Dow
(@CMU)
Joel Brandt
'10 (@Adobe)
Björn Hartmann
'09 (@Berkeley)
Ron Yeh
'07 (Entrepeneur)
- Twitter feed loading
Our research is made possible by the generous financial support of the
National Science Foundation,
Hasso Plattner Research Program, and Media X.
questions...
What does your research group do?
Design examples can powerfully illustrate concepts and alternatives. Online media offer examples at phenomenal scale and diversity. How can we leverage them? My group's research tools harvest and synthesize examples to empower more people to design, program, learn, and create. As a foundation, we study the social and psychological ingredients of design excellence. Demonstrating the power of examples beyond design, we create mobile interfaces for sharing expertise and achieving goals. Building on this, we are exploring peer learning and assessment for learning creative skills online. This online effort emerged from my design teaching, which emphasizes diverse ideation and self-assessment. To learn more, watch this overview talk.
We'd love to keep our research project pages up to date, but actually doing the research is more fun, so the project pages often fall behind. Our publications do a great job of describing completed work; read them to learn more. For online videos, check out:
Can we meet?
Sure! During the academic year, I hold weekly group office hours; swing by. During office hours, please come in. Do not wait outside. If you are a student, and we make decisions about your academic plan, follow up with an email to me summarizing the decisions we made. It's essential to have this in writing -- my memory is pretty good, but not perfect. (To enable me to focus on research during the summer, I don't hold summer office hours.)
I don't want to take up your office hours time with my question (about classes, degree requirements, recommendations, jobs, research...). Can we meet at another time?
These are all excellent topics for office hours. Over the years, I've experimented with many formats. I've found group office hours offers students the best experience. Often, students have related questions. (Even when ahead of time, they're sure they're the only one.) Other times, it may not be a question someone has yet, but it's valuable for the future. Furthermore, there are many questions for which students can chime in with valuable knowledge I don't have. (Like class recommendations and job advice.) In short, come to office hours: I hold them for you, and your question is welcome. If it's important that our discussion be confidential (i.e., not that you believe it would be boring or irrelevant to others, but the topic is private), come to office hours and let me know you have a private matter to discuss. We can speak privately at the end.
Will you approve transfer credit for courses at another insitution / AP credit?
Only when they're HCI courses. For all other courses, please speak with the educational affairs office on the first floor of Gates.
i'm a stanford student
Can I do research with your group?
One of the best parts of faculty life is working with talented students. The HCI faculty advise a small number of highly-motivated graduate and undergraduate students who are working on topics related to our group's research. Undergraduates: apply to Stanford's fantastic summer internship program, CURIS. If you'd like to join the HCI group, email the faculty member you'd like to work with; include your resume and transcript. A prerequisite for joining the HCI group is having taken and excelled in one of the HCI courses, such as cs147, cs247, or cs376. We also strongly recommend attending the HCI seminar.
I'm interested in human-computer interaction; what courses should I take?
The primary goal of the Stanford CS HCI curriculum is to introduce students to HCI's modes of thought and the skills to design, implement, and evaluate interactive systems. CS HCI students need a "tripod" of Computational Thinking, Design Thinking, and Empirical Thinking. The core HCI sequence is cs147 in the fall, cs247 in the winter, and cs376 in the spring. To bone up on your technical skills, look to courses like cs124, cs142, and cs148. Stanford's design school is unparalled; take advantage of it. We design interfaces for people; learn something about people (e.g., Psych55, Psych70) and how to do empirical work (e.g., Psych252, cs303). Here is a large list of courses relevant to HCI.
Any advice on picking classes?
- Shop
- Show up to the first day of more classes than you will eventually take. Attending the first day gives you more data about the class (topic, teaching quality, etc.). More data, better decisions.
- Challenge yourself
- Take classes that will deepen and broaden your knowledge. Don't shy away from something because it's "hard". Try it. Build up strong fundamentals. Dive deep into areas you're passionate about. And go out on a limb to try something brand new.
- Don't sink yourself
- Pay attention to how things are going, and adjust realistically and interactively. Adjust your courseload so that you can really learn the material in each course. There's no point to taking lots of classes if you're learning little and performing poorly. If you get in over your head, do something about it immediately. And use that knowledge to plan more judiciously the next quarter. (As opposed to saying, "I bombed last quarter. So this quarter I need to pile on even more.")
- Startup XOR classes
- There's not enough hours in the day to meaningfully do a startup and be a student. Both are valuable pursuits. But not simultaneously. If you want to do a startup, take a leave. And if you want to be a student, save the startup until after graduation. I serve as the academic advisor for more than 50 undergraduates. With this many advisees, every quarter, I get a letter or 2 from the provost that a student has been placed on probation because of poor academic achievement. Every single time, this probation is caused by students making unrealistic overcommitments, and then not being able to deliver. Don't make this mistake.
Recommendation Letters
Writing recommendation letters is one of the important things I do, and seeing students succeed in the next chapter of their lives composes a big part of the satisfaction I gain from my job. It also take a lot of time. I'm currently getting multiple requests for letters per week, every week. Unfortunately, a decent fraction of this time isn't the intellectual effort of composing a thoughtful letter, but the administrative tasks of gathering all the resources I need to write the letter, keeping track of the students/locations/status table, and dealing with the idiosyncrasies of all the web-forms. (It may be surprising to some, but the web has made letter-writing more time-consuming, not less.) If at all possible, please...
- Send all correspondence about recommendation letters to srk-admin@cs (not srk@cs), so that it goes to my admin also. This helps insure that nothing falls through the cracks. Also, use the srk-admin address on all Web sites.
- Ask for recommendation letters at least a month before they're due. While I can often get to them sooner, this lead time lets me work around travel, big deadlines, etc., so that I can block out a free, quiet time to write a thoughtful and substantive letter.
- Send one email that contains all of the information required to write the letters. This email should:
- Summarize your work in my research group and/or class(es). Include a particular example where you demonstrated creativity, determination, or excellent performance, or recognition. My memory is pretty good, but external aids are always helpful. Please send me content free of grammatical errors (if you need the help, ask a friend or colleague to do an editing pass). Summarize your work beginning with the most important contributions, not chronologically.
- Attach your transcript, CV/resume, and (if applicable) a draft of your statement (doesn't need to be final).
- Include a link to a Google spreadsheet of all schools (if you applying anywhere other than the Stanford CS co-term). The first column should list schools. The second column deadlines. The third email addresses, if at all possible. If email is not possible, include a link to a Web form. That helps my admin and I insure no school falls through the cracks.
- Ask your TA(s) for courses and/or your PhD mentor (for research) to send me an email describing the work you did. When you do, summarize your work for them to help jog their memory.
- If you are applying to any Stanford program, do not give me any paper. Really. Despite the fact that some claim to require paper (like the co-term), it works just fine to submit them electronically.
- If a non-Stanford program requires paper, please give it to my admin, Jillian Hess, in Gates 364
- Please do not worry that I will drop the ball and neglect to submit your letter on time. I am acutely aware of how important these letters are. I have written hundreds of recommendation letters, over more than a decade. Every single time that I have received the request at least a month in advance, I have submitted the letter in time. Sometimes -- especially during December's heavy season of PhD and faculty applications -- I submit my letter a few days after the applicant deadline. This has never caused a problem. When I submit your letter, I will notify you. If you like, you may email me one reminder. Please do not send more than one reminder. Email overload is the primary impediment to my writing your letter; please don't make it worse.
- No thank-you gifts. It's very kind, I appreciate the sentiment, and I understand it's unlikely that chocolate would sway a letter. But to make clear to your letter recipients that my kind words are based on your deeds, no gifts. There is one very important way to thank me: work to be a mind-blowing success wherever you go! That way, the letter I write for the next student will be received enthusiastically.
- Lastly, and most importantly, after you've been out in the world a while, let me know how you're doing! I'd love to hear from you. Share the exciting things you're up to, and also share any ideas you have about new things we should be teaching at Stanford.
Note: If you are reading this and you are involved with graduate admissions, you can help! First, do not have additional questions that are unique to your university. I work hard to write thoughtful, informative letters that are self-sufficient. University-specific questions do not provide significant incremental value, but do consume significant incremental time. It is not a scalable solution. Second, please encourage your institution to participate in a central clearinghouse for letters. That is a scalable solution.
Orals Committee
Learning about research in diverse areas something I really value about university life. And HCI, as a multidisciplinary field, provides many opportunities for these connections. Consequently, I enthusiastically accept invitations to participate on student's orals committees when the research has an HCI-relevant component -- and this can be construed broadly. For both of our benefit, I need to decline invitations when my expertise won't have much to offer. For your benefit, it's really important to assemble an orals committee that can provide you with meaningful feedback on your work. For mine, I have lots of research that I'm excited about doing -- if I can't meaningfully contribute at your orals, there are better uses of my time. If you send me an invitation to be on your orals, please include a sentence about what feedback you hope I'll offer on your work.
In general, I take my role on your orals committee to be a coach, not a judge. I presume that by the time you have scheduled your orals, you and your advisor both believe that you are ready. As such, my feedback will be about how to make your dissertation stronger. Please help me provide valuable feedback:
- Before your orals, please email me a draft of your dissertation (as an attachment or hyperlink).
- At the beginning of your orals, please provide me with a paper printout of your slides. It's much easier to take notes by annotating slides.
- Clear exposition is critical. In your presentation, clearly explain what you did, what the results were, how your work relates to prior work, how your results compare to alternative approaches, and what you take the import of your work to be. Well-designed visual aids (such as graphs) can help; Edward Tufte's books provide a great resource for this. In particular, remember to label the axes of graphs. Well-chosen photos, diagrams, and pictures help convey both content and setting. Remember the point of visuals is information, not decoration. If it distracts rather than adds, delete it.
- Make sure someone takes notes of all the questions your committee asks, and your responses to them. Not you, as you'll be immersed in the Q&A. Your advisor is generally a good person to ask to do this.
- After your orals, please email me a final draft of your dissertation that incorporates the feedback from the orals.
- If possible, please schedule your orals for an afternoon time, as I try to spend my mornings doing research. Friday afternoons starting at 2.15 are ideal (the HCI seminar runs until 2.05).
- At the beginning of your orals, please remind everyone to turn off their mobile phones and WiFi so that we can focus on your presentation.
- Email me directions of how to get to your orals from the Gates building. I may not know that the "conference room" in your department is room 203, where on the floor room 203 is, or even which of the sandstone buildings is yours :)
i'd like to apply to study hci at stanford
What department should I apply to?
Human-Computer Interaction is a popular focus area for several graduate programs. Graduate admissions are handled at a department level. For students with technical background and interests, Computer Science will likely be the best fit. (That said, there are no "rules" or specific prerequisite classes required for admission. On rare occasions, CS will accept students who have minimal CS background. These are students who seek a technical background, and who have stellar letters of recommendation.) Stanford also has several fantastic graduate programs for students seeking to study HCI with a design or social science focus. Examples include Product Design, Learning Science & Technology Design, Communications, Work, Technology, & Organization, and Symbolic Systems. Students in all departments at Stanford also have the opportunity to take classes in the d.school.
Can I discuss my application with you?
No. (So that the faculty can spend their time with current students, teaching, and doing research.) Stanford is a great place to be an undergraduate or graduate student. Put together a strong application. The admissions committee looks at a range of factors, including grades, test scores, and recommendations. One particularly important point is evidence of ability to do research -- if you have done research, your chances of admission are far better. Especially if you have worked on published research. Stress this in your application. If you'd like to get a feel for the Stanford HCI program, we encourage you to:
- join us for the Friday HCI Seminars (lectures are also videocast live and archived).
- attend quarterly final project presentations (sign up to get announcements).
- tour the d.school.
What should I put in my statement of purpose?
Paint a rich picture of the work you have done and the work you seek to do. Avoid vague claims of interest like "I have been fascinated by computers since childhood" or "Stanford has a great CS department" in favor of concrete descriptions of work you've done and topics you find interesting.
Non-Stanford students interested in internships
Generally speaking, we do not have the resources for non-Stanford interns. We will not respond to internship requests from students. If you have research experience in HCI, and are interested in a project related to our group's work, please have a faculty member at your university email me, and have them include an explanation of your particular qualifications for HCI research.
Can I do a Post-Doc with the HCI Group?
When there's a great fit, a talented student, and funding, the HCI Group sometimes has Post-Doc positions. If you write us about this, please explain how your background prepares you for this particular group, and what particular joint research opportunities you see. The volume of Post-Doc requests we receive prevents us from responding to generic inquiries.
outside collaborations, classes, hiring
How can we begin a collaboration?
We greatly value working with partners outside academia. If you would like to support our research, hire Stanford students, or get involved in any other way:- The Stanford Computer Forum is ready to help.
- Join us on Fridays for the HCI seminar.
- Join the HCI Friends mailing list. Once a quarter, we'll send out final project presentation announcements. This is the best way to meet students, talk with them about their work, and discuss common interests.
Can I take your class for professional development?
Yes. Provided you have the required background, you can take HCI classes as a Non-Degree-Option student through Stanford's Center for Professional Development.
We would like to hire your best student for an internship. Can you put us in touch?
We get several requests per day seeking to hire Stanford HCI students for internships. Given this volume, please follow these instructions to insure the best students read your email. The best way to send internship requests is to contact the Computer Forum. They are extremely effective at getting the word out -- much better than us. If you do send us an email that you want to be sent to students: Please send one email to srk-admin@cs.stanford edu that can be forwarded *as is*. No attachments. No preamble. Just what should be forwarded. Also, as mentioned above, join us for the HCI Seminar and sign up for quarterly announcements -- the quarterly final project presentations are the best place to meet students and see their work firsthand.
Employers interested in hiring Stanford PhD interns
Internships are a great way to expose students to real problems and learn how people really use interactive systems. Internships also provide students with valuable experience about what it's like to work outside the university. We encourage PhD students to seek internships when it will likely contribute to the student's dissertation research. Consequently, it's tremendously import that students be able to publish their internship work and use the resulting data and insights to further their research. When appropriate, code that interns write may be proprietary to the employer. However, employers should anticipate -- indeed relish -- the idea that students will continue working in the area of their research internship, and that after their internship students will continue to publish and produce code that is often open source. Interns provide their employer the opportunity to closely collaborate with someone immersed in the culture, insights, and innovations of their university. These internships often result in long-term collaborations with the student and with faculty.