The College of Information Sciences and Technology is a new college and a new kind of college for a new era. We are dedicated to educating the next generation of leaders for the flat world of the digital global economy with student-centric, problem-based learning, focused on real challenges and applications.

Human enterprises of all kinds are increasingly fueled by flows of information. Our research and scholarship are aimed at the leading edge of information technology design and at understanding the impact of information on our lives, organizations, cultures, and societies. In short—we are inspired to seek solutions for the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Our faculty and students are engaged in exploring a range of areas, including: information seeking, agent and avatar design, service science, games, entertainment, and the issues posed by information security and privacy. Through research, programs of outreach, and informal education, we seek to bridge the digital divide through empowerment and to diversify participation in the information economy.

The frontier of this emerging field lies in the terra incognita left mostly untouched by the existing disciplines. Cyberspace in the early twenty-first century and beyond will be best explored and surveyed by a community of scholars and thinkers with different backgrounds, expertise, and experiences, but with respect for each others’ domains, contributions, and potential for intellectual accomplishment. Therefore, unlike other colleges, we are not organized into sub-disciplines and departments, so that we may not only remain maximally flexible and responsive to inexorable change, but also proactively find synergy from multiple perspectives and disciplines.

Although not departmentalized, we are shaping education and research along one central theme: As we seek to engineer better solutions for the world at large, we can only do so through the integration of a concern for people and culture at all levels of information technology development and design, and into all aspects of the ongoing evolution of information sciences. All technology is human technology, but successful technology must be humanized.

Whether you are a prospective student or currently enrolled as an undergraduate or graduate student, a potential partner, or a colleague from another discipline or institution, I hope that you are intrigued by what we are doing here and I invite you to learn more by taking some time to browse this Web site—our home in cyberspace.

Dean Henry C. “Hank” Foley