Greetings:
Jeff MacKie-Mason suggested we contact you about a funding opportunity for doctoral students. We provide very generous support to new Ph.D. students interested in a multidisciplinary incentive-centered design (ICD) approach to research questions relevant to modern information systems. We think that one of the best ways to find potential candidates for this program and fellowship opportunity is to talk to our colleagues in excellent undergraduate and Masters programs who counsel students about the future. That’s why I’m writing you.
This Ph.D. research training program, called STIET, involves the University of Michigan’s School of Information, Department of
Economics, and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Wayne State University’s Departments of Economics,
Computer Science, and Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering. You can find out more about STIET at < http://stiet.si.umich.edu
>. A poster about STIET that can be printed to post or distribute is at
< http://www.si.umich.edu/stietold/posters/stiet_poster_07.pdf
>.
Our research focus is “incentive-centered design” (ICD). This is a multidisciplinary approach to information system design problems that takes as central the need to design for autonomous, motivated, strategically-aware human participants in the systems. We draw from the social sciences of motivated human behavior, including especially economics (mechanism design), game theory, social psychology and decision theory, and computer engineering sciences including especially artificial intelligence, algorithms, and security.
For example, we have made many contributions to pragmatic auction design and bidding theory. More recently, a growing number of STIET faculty are applying ICD methods to problems in social computing, online communities, user-contributed content, home computer security, open source software, peer-to-peer resource sharing, prediction markets, recommender systems, and a wide array of other settings in which interactions among humans are a defining characteristic of the information system.
Students apply to and are admitted by one of these departments, and earn a regular Ph.D. from that department. If they are awarded a STIET traineeship, they receive a $30,000 stipend (12 months), full tuition remission, and health insurance for two years. We also provide generous funding for travel and computing. Our participating departments generally supplement this award with a financial support package for the later years, often providing five years of guaranteed funding (subject to maintaining good standing). STIET students supplement their department coursework with a few courses outside their home discipline, and participate from their first week in our top-notch research seminar with weekly presentations of new research by leading scholars from around the world (see http://stiet.cms.si.umich.edu/calendar).
If you know of U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are looking for a research degree relating to incentive-centered design, please encourage them to apply and consider a STIET fellowship. Please feel free to contact Yan Chen (yanchen@umich.edu;
734-764-9488), the Director of STIET if you would like to know more.
Last, please email STIET (stiet-info@umich.edu) any names and email addresses of students who might be interested, so we can contact them about the fellowship opportunity directly.
Thanks!