Information (INFO)

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 8 Week Session, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Summer 2021 8 Week Session, Fall 2020
Foundations of data science from three perspectives: inferential thinking, computational thinking, and real-world relevance. Given data arising from some real-world phenomenon, how does one analyze that data so as to understand that phenomenon? The course teaches critical concepts and skills in computer programming and statistical inference, in conjunction with hands-on analysis of real-world datasets, including economic data, document collections, geographical data, and social networks. It delves into social and legal issues surrounding data analysis, including issues of privacy and data ownership.
Foundations of Data Science: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
Lectures and small group discussions focusing on topics of interest, varying from semester to semester.
Directed Group Study for Lower Division Undergraduates: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022
This class introduces key issues, concepts, and methodologies of information studies. Students consider questions such as: what does it mean to live in an information society? What are the human and social aspects of the design of technology? How do policy, law, and other social forces affect this? How can technology and data be designed for social good? Students will become familiar with the kinds of research and multidisciplinary methods used in information studies. Students leave the course with tools to understand the politics, economics, and culture of information systems; a nuanced understanding of contemporary case studies involving technological systems in society; and a solid foundation for further study in information science.
Introduction to Information Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
Surveying history through the lens of information and information through the lens of history, this course looks across time to consider what might distinguish ours as "the information age" and what that description implies about the role of "information technology" across time. We will select moments in societies' development of information production, circulation, consumption, and storage from the earliest writing and numbering systems to the world of Social Media. In every instance, we'll be concerned with what and when, but also with how and why. Throughout we will keep returning to questions about how information-technological developments affect society and vice versa?
History of Information: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Methods and concepts of creating design requirements and evaluating prototypes and existing systems. Emphasis on computer-based systems, including mobile system and ubiquitous computing, but may be suitable for students interested in other domains of design for end-users. Includes quantitative and qualitative methods as applied to design, usually for short-term term studies intended to provide guidance for designers.
User Experience Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
This course applies economic tools and principles, including game theory, industrial organization, information economics, and behavioral economics, to analyze business strategies and public policy issues surrounding information technologies and IT industries. Topics include: economics of information goods, services, and platforms; economics of information and asymmetric information; economics of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy, and peer production; strategic pricing; strategic complements and substitutes; competition and antitrust; Internet industry structure and regulation; network cascades, network formation, and network structure.

Information Technology Economics, Strategy, and Policy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is a survey of technologies that power the user interfaces of web applications on a variety of devices today, including desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. This course will delve into some of the core Front-End languages and frameworks (HTML/CSS/JS/React/Redux), as well as the underlying technologies enable web applications (HTTP, URI, JSON). The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the technical issues surrounding user interfaces powered by the web today, and to provide a solid and comprehensive perspective of the Web's constantly evolving landscape.

Front-End Web Architecture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is a survey of web technologies that are used to build back-end systems that enable rich web applications. Utilizing technologies such as Python, FastAPI, Docker, RDBMS/NoSQL databases, and Celery/Redis, this class aims to cover the foundational concepts that drive the web today. This class focuses on building APIs using microservices that power everything from content management systems to data engineering pipelines that provide insights by processing large amounts of data. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the technical issues surrounding back-end systems today and to provide a solid and comprehensive perspective of the web’s constantly evolving landscape.
Back-End Web Architecture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course introduces students to natural language processing and exposes them to the variety of methods available for reasoning about text in computational systems. NLP is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on both linguistics and computer science, and helps drive much contemporary work in text analysis (as used in computational social science, the digital humanities, and computational journalism). We will focus on major algorithms used in NLP for various applications (part-of-speech tagging, parsing, coreference resolution, machine translation) and on the linguistic phenomena those algorithms attempt to model. Students will implement algorithms and create linguistically annotated data on which those algorithms depend.
Natural Language Processing: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
This course blends social and historical perspectives on data with ethics, law, policy, and case examples to help students understand current ethical and legal issues in data science and machine learning. Legal, ethical, and policy-related concepts addressed include: research ethics; privacy and surveillance; bias and discrimination; and oversight and accountability. These issues will be addressed throughout the lifecycle of data--from collection to storage to analysis and application. The course emphasizes strategies, processes, and tools for attending to ethical and legal issues in data science work. Course assignments emphasize researcher and practitioner reflexivity, allowing students to explore their own social and ethical commitments.
Behind the Data: Humans and Values: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
A seminar focusing on topics of current interest. Topics will vary. A seminar paper will be required. Open to students from other departments.
Special Topics in Information: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2015

Directed Group Study for Advanced Undergraduates: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2016
Individual study of topics in information management and systems under faculty supervision.
Individual Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Introduces the data sciences landscape, with a particular focus on learning data science techniques to uncover and answer the questions students will encounter in industry. Lectures, readings, discussions, and assignments will teach how to apply disciplined, creative methods to ask better questions, gather data, interpret results, and convey findings to various audiences. The emphasis throughout is on making practical contributions to real decisions that organizations will and should make. Course must be taken for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirements.
Research Design and Applications for Data and Analysis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course introduces the intellectual foundations of information organization and retrieval: conceptual modeling, semantic representation, vocabulary and metadata design, classification, and standardization, as well as information retrieval practices, technology, and applications, including computational processes for analyzing information in both textual and non-textual formats.
Information Organization and Retrieval: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is designed to be an introduction to the topics and issues associated with information and information technology and its role in society. Throughout the semester we will consider both the consequence and impact of technologies on social groups and on social interaction and how society defines and shapes the technologies that are produced. Students will be exposed to a broad range of applied and practical problems, theoretical issues, as well as methods used in social scientific analysis. The four sections of the course are: 1) theories of technology in society, 2) information technology in workplaces 3) automation vs. humans, and 4) networked sociability.
Social Issues of Information: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course uses examples from various commercial domains—retail, health, credit, entertainment, social media, and biosensing/quantified self—to explore legal and ethical issues including freedom of expression, privacy, research ethics, consumer protection, information and cybersecurity, and copyright. The class emphasizes how existing legal and policy frameworks constrain, inform, and enable the architecture, interfaces, data practices, and consumer facing policies and documentation of such offerings; and, fosters reflection on the ethical impact of information and communication technologies and the role of information professionals in legal and ethical work.
Information Law and Policy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course introduces the basics of computer programming that are essential for those interested in computer science, data science, and information management. Students will write their own interactive programs (in Python) to analyze data, process text, draw graphics, manipulate images, and simulate physical systems. Problem decomposition, program efficiency, and good programming style are emphasized throughout the course.

Introduction to Programming and Computation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The ability to represent, manipulate, and analyze structured data sets is foundational to the modern practice of data science. This course introduces students to the fundamentals of data structures and data analysis (in Python). Best practices for writing code are emphasized throughout the course. This course forms the second half of a sequence that begins with INFO 106. It may also be taken as a stand-alone course by any student that has sufficient Python experience.
Introduction to Data Structures and Analytics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course will provide an introduction to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Students will learn to apply design thinking to User Experience (UX) design, prototyping, & evaluation. The course will also cover special topic areas within HCI.
Introduction to User Experience Design: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research, from understanding and identifying needs, to evaluating concepts and designs, to assessing the usability of products and solutions. We emphasize methods of collecting and interpreting qualitative data about user activities, working both individually and in teams, and translating them into design decisions. Students gain hands-on practice with observation, interview, survey, focus groups, and expert review. Team activities and group work are required during class and for most assignments. Additional topics include research in enterprise, consulting, and startup organizations, lean/agile techniques, mobile research approaches, and strategies for communicating findings.
User Experience Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course will give participants hands-on digital product design experience oriented around current industry practice. The course will be project-based with an emphasis on iteration, practice, and critique. During the course, participants will work on a series of design projects through a full design process, including developing appropriate design deliverables, gathering feedback, and iterating on designs.

Product Design Studio: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
This course is a graduate-level introduction to HCI research. Students will learn to conduct
original HCI research by reading and discussing research papers while collaborating on a
semester-long research project. Each week the class will focus on a theme of HCI research and
review foundational and cutting-edge research relevant to that theme. The class will focus on the
following areas of HCI research: ubiquitous computing, social computing, critical theory, and
human-AI interaction. In addition to these research topics the class will introduce common
qualitative and quantitative methodologies in HCI research.
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
As it's generally used, "information" is a collection of notions, rather than a single coherent concept. In this course, we'll examine conceptions of information based in information theory, philosophy, social science, economics, and history. Issues include: How compatible are these conceptions; can we talk about "information" in the abstract? What work do these various notions play in discussions of literacy, intellectual property, advertising, and the political process? And where does this leave "information studies" and "the information society"?
Concepts of Information: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course focuses on the practice of leadership, collaboration, and people management in contemporary, distributed, information and technology-rich organizations. Not just for potential people managers, this course is derived from the premise that a foundation in leadership, management, and collaboration is essential for individuals in all roles, at any stage of their career. To build this foundation we will take a hybrid approach, engaging literature from disciplines such as social psychology, management, and organizational behavior, as well as leveraging case studies and practical exercises. The course will place a special emphasis on understanding and reacting to social dynamics in workplace hierarchies and teams.
Leadership and Management: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2013, Spring 2011
This class is for graduate students interested in getting an advanced understanding of judgments and decisions made with predictive algorithms. The course will survey the vast literature on the psychology of how people arrive at judgments and make decisions with the help of statistical information, focused mostly on experimental lab evidence from cognitive and social psychology. Then study the burgeoning evidence on how people use statistical algorithms in practice, exploring field evidence from a range of settings from criminal justice and healthcare to housing and labor markets. Special attention is paid to psychological principles that impact the effectiveness and fairness of algorithms deployed at scale.
Decisions and Algorithms: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Discusses application of social psychological theory and research to information technologies and systems; we focus on sociological social psychology, which largely focuses on group processes, networks, and interpersonal relationships. Information technologies considered include software systems used on the internet such as social networks, email, and social games, as well as specific hardware technologies such as mobile devices, computers, wearables, and virtual/augmented reality devices. We examine human communication practices, through the lens of different social psychology theories, including: symbolic interaction, identity theories, social exchange theory, status construction theory, and social networks and social structure theory.
Social Psychology and Information Technology: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
This course applies economic tools and principles, including game theory, industrial organization, information economics, and behavioral economics, to analyze business strategies and public policy issues surrounding information technologies and IT industries. Topics include: economics of information goods, services, and platforms; economics of information and asymmetric information; economics of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy, and peer production; strategic pricing; strategic complements and substitutes; competition and antitrust; Internet industry structure and regulation; network cascades, network formation, and network structure.

Information Technology Economics, Strategy, and Policy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2018
The introduction of technology increasingly delegates responsibility to technical actors, often reducing traditional forms of transparency and challenging traditional methods for accountability. This course explores the interaction between technical design and values including: privacy, accessibility, fairness, and freedom of expression. We will draw on literature from design, science and technology studies, computer science, law, and ethics, as well as primary sources in policy, standards and source code. We will investigate approaches to identifying the value implications of technical designs and use methods and tools for intentionally building in values at the outset.
Technology and Delegation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2022
This course introduces students to experimentation in data science. Particular attention is paid to the formation of causal
questions, and the design and analysis of experiments to provide answers to these questions. This topic has increased
considerably in importance since 1995, as researchers have learned to think creatively about how to generate data in more
scientific ways, and developments in information technology has facilitated the development of better data gathering.
Experiments and Causal Inference: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
The design and presentation of digital information. Use of graphics, animation, sound, visualization software, and hypermedia in presenting information to the user. Methods of presenting complex information to enhance comprehension and analysis. Incorporation of visualization techniques into human-computer interfaces. Course must be completed for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirements.
Information Visualization and Presentation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Provides a theoretical and practical introduction to modern techniques in applied machine learning. Covers key concepts in supervised and unsupervised machine learning, including the design of machine learning experiments, algorithms for prediction and inference, optimization, and evaluation. Students will learn functional, procedural, and statistical programming techniques for working with real-world data.
Applied Machine Learning: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is a survey of technologies that power the user interfaces of web applications on a variety of devices today, including desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. This course will delve into some of the core Front-End languages and frameworks (HTML/CSS/JS/React/Redux), as well as the underlying technologies enable web applications (HTTP, URI, JSON). The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the technical issues surrounding user interfaces powered by the web today, and to provide a solid and comprehensive perspective of the Web's constantly evolving landscape.

Front-End Web Architecture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course is a survey of web technologies that are used to build back-end systems that enable rich web applications. Utilizing technologies such as Python, Flask, Docker, RDBMS/NoSQL databases, and Spark, this class aims to cover the foundational concepts that drive the web today. This class focuses on building APIs using micro-services that power everything from content management systems to data engineering pipelines that provide insights by processing large amounts of data. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the technical issues surrounding back-end systems today, and to provide a solid and comprehensive perspective of the web's constantly evolving landscape.
Back-End Web Architecture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The course overviews a broad number of paradigms of privacy from a technical point of view. The course is designed to assist system engineers and information systems professionals in getting familiar with the subject of privacy engineering and train them in implementing those mechanisms. In addition, the course is designed to coach those professionals to critically think about the strengths and weaknesses of the different privacy paradigms. These skills are important for cybersecurity professionals and enable them to effectively incorporate privacy-awareness in the design phase of their products.
Privacy Engineering: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course examines the use of natural language processing as a set of methods for exploring and reasoning about text as data, focusing especially on the applied side of NLP — using existing NLP methods and libraries in Python in new and creative ways. Topics include part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, text classification, information extraction, incorporation of lexicons and ontologies into text analysis, and question answering. Students will apply and extend existing software tools to text-processing problems.
Applied Natural Language Processing: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2022
This course will cover the principles and practices of managing data at scale, with a focus on use cases in data analysis and machine learning. We will cover the entire life cycle of data management and science, ranging from data preparation to exploration, visualization and analysis, to machine learning and collaboration, with a focus on ensuring reliable, scalable operationalization.
ensuring reliable, scalable operationalization.
Data Engineering: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course introduces students to natural language processing and exposes them to the variety of methods available for reasoning about text in computational systems. NLP is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on both linguistics and computer science, and helps drive much contemporary work in text analysis (as used in computational social science, the digital humanities, and computational journalism). We will focus on major algorithms used in NLP for various applications (part-of-speech tagging, parsing, coreference resolution, machine translation) and on the linguistic phenomena those algorithms attempt to model. Students will implement algorithms and create linguistically annotated data on which those algorithms depend.
Natural Language Processing: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course explores the theory and practice of Tangible User Interfaces, a new approach to Human Computer Interaction that focuses on the physical interaction with computational media. The topics covered in the course include theoretical framework, design examples, enabling technologies, and evaluation of Tangible User Interfaces. Students will design and develop experimental Tangible User Interfaces using physical computing prototyping tools and write a final project report.
Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course will cover new interface metaphors beyond desktops (e.g., for mobile devices, computationally enhanced environments, tangible user interfaces) but will also cover visual design basics (e.g., color, layout, typography, iconography) so that we have systematic and critical understanding of aesthetically engaging interfaces. Students will get a hands-on learning experience on these topics through course projects, design critiques, and discussions, in addition to lectures and readings.
Interface Aesthetics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Introduction to many different types of quantitative research methods, with an emphasis on linking quantitative statistical techniques to real-world research methods. Introductory and intermediate topics include: defining research problems, theory testing, casual inference, probability, and univariate statistics. Research design and methodology topics include: primary/secondary survey data analysis, experimental designs, and coding qualitative data for quantitative analysis.
Quantitative Research Methods for Information Systems and Management: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Theory and practice of naturalistic inquiry. Grounded theory. Ethnographic methods including interviews, focus groups, naturalistic observation. Case studies. Analysis of qualitative data. Issues of validity and generalizability in qualitative research.
Qualitative Research Methods for Information Systems and Management: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
This seminar reviews current literature and debates regarding Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD). This is an interdisciplinary and practice-oriented field that draws on insights from economics, sociology, engineering, computer science, management, public health, etc.
Information and Communications Technology for Development: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2019
As new sources of digital data proliferate in developing economies, there is the exciting possibility that such data could be used to benefit the world’s poor. Through a careful reading of recent research and through hands-on analysis of large-scale datasets, this course introduces students to the opportunities and challenges for data-intensive approaches to international development. Students should be prepared to dissect, discuss, and replicate academic publications from several fields including development economics, machine learning, information science, and computational social science. Students will also conduct original statistical and computational analysis of real-world data.
Big Data and Development: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course provides students with real-world experience assisting politically vulnerable organizations and persons around the world to develop and implement sound cybersecurity practices. In the classroom, students study basic theories and practices of digital security, intricacies of protecting largely under-resourced organizations, and tools needed to manage risk in complex political, sociological, legal, and ethical contexts. In the clinic, students work in teams supervised by Clinic staff to provide direct cybersecurity assistance to civil society organizations. We emphasize pragmatic, workable solutions that take into account the unique needs of each partner organization.
Public Interest Cybersecurity: The Cybersecurity Clinic Practicum: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Specific topics, hours, and credit may vary from section to section, year to year.
Special Topics in Information: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Specific topics, hours, and credit may vary from section to section and year to year.
Special Topics in Management: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Specific topics, hours, and credit may vary from section to section and year to year.
Special Topics in Social Science and Policy: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Specific topics, hours, and credit may vary from section to section and year to year.
Special Topics in Technology: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Specific topics, hours, and credit may vary from section to section, year to year.
Special Topics in Information: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Summer 2016 10 Week Session, Spring 2016
This course is designed to help School of Information graduate students maximize their internship, practicum, or independent research experiences.

Information Management Practicum: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
An intensive weekly discussion of current and ongoing research by Ph.D. students with a research interest in issues of information (social, legal, technical, theoretical, etc.). Our goal is to focus on critiquing research problems, theories, and methodologies from multiple perspectives so that we can produce high-quality, publishable work in the interdisciplinary area of information research. Circulated material may include dissertation chapters, qualifying papers, article drafts, and/or new project ideas. We want to have critical and productive discussion, but above all else we want to make our work better: more interesting, more accessible, more rigorous, more theoretically grounded, and more like the stuff we enjoy reading.
Doctoral Research and Theory Workshop: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Colloquia, discussion and readings designed to introduce students to the range of interests of the school.
Doctoral Colloquium: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year.
Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2016, Fall 2015
Group projects on special topics in information management and systems.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2016, Spring 2015
The final project is designed to integrate the skills and concepts learned during the Information School Master's program and helps prepare students to compete in the job market. It provides experience in formulating and carrying out a sustained, coherent, and significant course of work resulting in a tangible work product; in project management, in presenting work in both written and oral form; and, when appropriate, in working in a multidisciplinary team. Projects may take the form of research papers or professionally-oriented applied work.
Directed Group Work on Final Project: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Summer 2016 8 Week Session, Spring 2016
Individual study of topics in information management and systems under faculty supervision.
Individual Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2021
Discussion, reading, preparation, and practical experience under faculty supervision in the teaching of specific topics within information management and systems. Does not count toward a degree.
Teaching Assistance Practicum: Read More [+]