Mission Statement
The Computational Media Department (CM) engages in boundary-pushing research and education that integrates technical, interpretive, and design work to create human-centered media that address complex problems for societal impact.
These are the core values we hold, which form the foundation on which we perform work and conduct ourselves as scholars, researchers, and members of communities:
• Impactful: We create media, experiences and ways of understanding that have an impact in the world we live in.
• Socially responsible: We actively perform research and education that benefit society at large and advance social goals.
• Open: We embrace diverse ideas, disciplines, approaches, concepts, and methods in our work and community.
• Boundary-pushing: We are forward facing while being reflective of the past.
• Collegial: We engage in partnership across our communities in a respectful manner.
• Address “messy” problems: We are unafraid of handling real-world problems that are naturally messy.
CM hosts the Expressive Intelligence Studio, Social and Emotional Technology Lab, Assistive Sociotechnical Systems for Individuals with Special needs, Creative Coding Lab, Alternative Learning Technologies and Games Lab, Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Human-Robot Interaction Lab, Tech4Good Lab, Augmented Design Lab, Software Introspection Lab, and the Design Reasoning Lab.
CM also hosts the Center for Computational Experiences, a cross-disciplinary center that is home to games and HCI researchers across UC Santa Cruz.
Contact Us
For questions/comments regarding the undergraduate program: cm-ugrad@soe.ucsc.edu
For questions/comments regarding the graduate program: cm-grad@soe.ucsc.edu
For general questions about the Computational Media department: cm-questions@soe.ucsc.edu
Santa Cruz, CA—Computational Media Professor Katherine Isbister at UC Santa Cruz has received $373,000 from the National Science Foundation to fund “Social Virtual Reality Technology to Improve Networked Meetings.” The project will investigate how social VR technology can be used to enhance... Read More
All seventeen of UC Santa Cruz’s graduate engineering programs have chosen to temporarily waive the GRE test requirement for 2021 applicants. Ten programs have permanently dropped the test. As the COVID-19 crisis extends into the Fall, it is pushing many universities to change the ways... Read More
Oleksandra Keehl, a computational media Ph.D student working with Assistant Professor Adam Smith, has received one of twenty Women Techmaker Scholars Program scholarships awarded each year. The award will help her develop a mobile game designed to help Japanese language learners master kanji,... Read More