On April 18th I took part in an IRCSET funded GREP research visit with my colleague Gavin Doherty from Trinity College Dublin. IRCSET funded an exploratory grant which supported this trip for the development of a Graduate Programme in Visualisation, Graphics and Vision.

We attended an Open Day of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and the Interactive Institute in Stockholm Sweden hosted by Dr. Jim Dowling. The aim of this visit was document best practice in graduate research education and to understand how stronger links with industry and research labs can be developed. While this was only a one day event we managed to speak with over 20 academics and graduate students from around Sweden representing 6 different Universities.

The following day a group of HCI academics in Uppsala very graciously gave us many hours of their time for an in depth discussion of graduate education in Sweden. Their combined experience has brought about their inter-disciplinary Master in HCI. From their description of the years of effort in creating this program and the strong industry links it’s clear this will be the gold standard in graduate HCI education.

Our meeting in Uppsala was a very productive and informative half-day event. We are very thankful to Professor Mats Lind, Professor Jan Gulliksen, Professor Bengt Sandblad and all their team for their time and efforts with us. Graduate Education both taught and at the post doctoral level is markedly different between Sweden and Ireland. We aim to learn from these differences. We hope our proposed GREP can establish strong links with this world class HCI program.