Studying on the Human-Computer Interaction program at SUNY Oswego is a truly international experience, faculty and students from all over the world work together on a range of learning experience and diverse research projects. All of the HCI faculty infuse their classes with international activities including interships with overseas organisations, study abroad opportunies, collaborative research projects with overseas scholars, and video-calls with students in other countries.
Globalization is here to stay, and students who want to work in our interconnected world need to have an international outlook. Research has shown that few other educational experiences have proven to net such a positive and sustainable impact as international travel and cross-cultural interactions.
Up until a few years ago, study abroad experiences were offered by the HCI program every summer to Australia and Vietnam. The global COVID-19 pandemic put a temporary halt to these activities, however, we hoipe to be able to offer these experiences regularly again in coming years.
The HCI program took a group of students every summer on a short study abroad trip to Australia. During this three-week trip, our HCI students study transhumanism and collaborate on media and robot projects with students from RMIT University in Melbourne.
We are sure that many of our graduate students take advantage of this opportunity so they can travel around Australia and get to see some of the local wildlife.
The HCI program offers regular internships in collaboration with Duy Tan University in Da Nang, Vietnam. Here students undertake a two-month long internship with the Center for Visualization and Simulation (CVS). CVS develop virtual reality based, medical systems to teach anatomy.
While in Vietnam, the students work on redesigning the virtual interfaces to a range of CVS anatomical software systems.
The HCI program has offered many other interational experiences on a less regular basis, including study abroad activities in England, China, Spain, India, Brazil, and France. These are not run on a regular basis, but we intend to keep offering these study abroad opportunities (or other new ones) in coming years. A couple of these study abroad experiences are described below.
Groups of HCI students have travelled to Spain multiple times to undertake 2-month internships in the Laboratorio de Realidad Virtual, at the University of Granada, in Granada, Spain. The students worked on a range of virtual reality and augmented reality projects for vitual museum exhibitions and the preservation of Spanish cultural heritage.
The program has an established relationship with universities in Brazil and students have undertaken 2-month internships working in LabTEVE, a virtual reality and media research laboratory at the Federal University of Pariba, in Joao Pesoa, Brazil. HCI students have worked on a range of projects involving augmented reality, robotics, and accessibility.
The HCI Program has created, and continues to offer, a number of COIL courses. This involves the creation of a number of innovative, collaborative, international, courses in multiple discipline areas. This initiative is strongly supported throughout the SUNY system.
Students from SUNY Oswego typically interact with students overseas through the use of video-conferencing and social media technology. Guided by professors in multiple countries, students collaborate on multiple group assignments and projects.