The Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech has established an NSF Graduate Research Traineeship Program to support Ph.D. studies in Human-Computer Interaction.
Additional funds are available for equipment, supplies, and relevant travel.
The current research focus of our group is supporting collaborative education over networks. In this research, we are leveraging and developing the Blacksburg Electronic Network, an advanced community network that provides a variety of computer networking services, including Internet, access to newsgroups, gophers, and web-pages, and a local network infrastructure for information and communication to the town of Blacksburg. The university, the public schools, and parts of the community are networked with ethernet. We have just begun a substantial 3-year NSF project to develop and study the use of collaborative virtual laboratories in middle school physical science and high school physics. The Department has an NSF Research Infrastructure grant, which has renovated 1800 square feet of laboratory space for HCI and provided a variety of new equipment, and an NSF Educational Infrastructure grant, which has supported the development of digital library and networking resources for Computer Science courses, including graduate courses.