Stephen B. Gilbert

My current work explores the effect of the MIT's System Design & Management distance learning degree program on its students (experienced engineers) and their work environments.
Check out my latest presentation.

During my 7 years at MIT I have studied how people learn, especially through interacting with technology. Now I am prepared and eager to help educators implement the many good tools and ideas that the research community has produced. As organizations gain more and more access to technology, many educators and trainers still wonder how it can be used to improve students' learning. My long experience with students, research on how people learn and adapt to new ideas, and technical skills point me towards helping people incorporate appropriate technologies into their work.

Education

University

• Massachusetts Insitute of Technology
  Ph.D. in Brain & Cognitive Sciences, February 1997. Thesis under Professor Whitman Richards on "Mapping Mental Spaces:How We Organize Perceptual and Cognitive Information." Modeling knowledge structures, comparing concept-scaling techniques such as Multi-Dimensional Scaling and clustering. Applications include new indexing techniques for Digital Libraries or navigation through the web.
  
  Recipient, Angus N. MacDonald Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1997.

• Princeton University
  B.S.E. in Civil Engineering & Operations Research, June 1992. Curriculum emphasized operations research, human-computer interaction, and methods in 3-D data visualization. Minor in psychology.
  
  Recipient, Kenneth H. Condit Award for outstanding civil engineering thesis, 1992.
  Member, Sigma Xi.
  

Primary & Secondary School

• St. Mark's School of Texas. (1976-1988)
• Gesamtschule Kirchhain, Germany (exchange student, 1986-1987)

Experience

• Research Fellow in Educational Technologies, MIT Center for Innovation in Product Development
  September, 1997 - Present
  Analyzing the effect of the MIT SDM degree program on its students (experienced engineers) and their work environments; exploring technologies for distance learning.

• Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT Perceptual Sciences Group
  February - August, 1997
  Under professors Whitman Richards and Ted Adelson, Made Trajectory Mapping algorithm available online. Supervised 2 undergraduate research assistants.

• Instructor & Webmaster, MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences
  Introduction to Psychology: Under Professor Steven Pinker, responsible for managing 13 teaching assistants, creating classroom demonstrations and designing web site (Fall 1996).

• Teaching Assistant & Webmaster, MIT Media Lab
  MAS 123 Tools for Thought: Organized the use of multiple technologies in this MIT Media Lab course about different ways that tools and toys represent information through their design (Spring 1995).

• Teaching Assistant & Webmaster, MIT Media Lab
  MAS 134 Story, Representation & Process: Introduced students to the web and to HTML; coordinated technology in this MIT Media Lab course about representation of narrative in various media: the web, film, digital video, and television. (Fall 1994).

• Computer Graphics Designer, Princeton
  Designed and programmed computer graphics software for Professor Joel Cooper of the Princeton University Psychology Department for use in an experiment on gender differences in learning while being guided by an animated computer character, SGI platform (Summer 1992).

• Surveyor and GIS Designer, Cyprus
  Led surveying team and designed Geographic Information System for the Polis Archaeological Expedition of Princeton University, Cyprus. Designed and programmed a system for collecting topographic site information for visualization on an IBM PC and SGI platforms (Summers 1990-1991).

• Lennox International Headquarters, Dallas
  As summer intern, assisted in the upgrade of the mainframe computer system. Also worked in computer operations and software development (Summer 1989).

Publications & Presentations

Negotiating Learning Cultures at a Distance: MIT Academics Teach Corporate Engineers

S Gilbert. Talk at the Stanford Learning Lab, April 8, 1999, as part of their Spring 1999 Speaker Series.

Analysis of Hybrid Distance Learning: Corporate Employees in Academic Courses

S Gilbert, L Ngo, and L Breisch.
Poster presented at the Third International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS-98), 1998.

Information Technology Literacy

Paper presented at the workshop entitled
"What Everyone Should Know about Information Technology Literacy", organized by the
Committee on Information Technology Literacy of the National Research Council's
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, January 14-15, 1998.

An objective approach to trajectory mapping through simulated annealing.

S Gilbert.
Paper in the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1997, Palo Alto, California.

Web-Based Learning: PBS Teleconference Panelist -- Handouts for the talk

The National Conference on College Teaching and Learning (Eighth),
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning,
Florida Community College at Jacksonville, April 17, 1997.

The web as a student communication medium: What's different?

SA Gilbert.
Paper in the Proceedings of AACE ED-MEDIA 96 Conference, Boston.
Outstanding Paper Award.

Structuring information with mental models: A tour of Boston.

I Lokuge, SA Gilbert, and W Richards.
Paper in the Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI '96, Vancouver.

Visualizing information space: A tour through Boston.

I Lokuge, SA Gilbert, and W Richards.
Poster presented at ECVP '95, Tübingen.
Abstract in Perception, 24 Supplement

A collaborative approach to environmental education using hypertext.

SL Chorover, SA Gilbert, and JM Lafayette.
Poster presented at AACE ED-MEDIA 94, Vancouver.

Using trajectory mapping to analyze musical intervals.

SA Gilbert & W Richards.
Paper in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1994, Atlanta.

Lateral control of an autonomous road vehicle in a simulated highway environment using adaptive resonance neural networks.

JM Lubin, EC Huber, S Gilbert, AL Kornhauser.
Paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles '92 Symposium, 1992

Teaching Interests

Designers should also appreciate the impacts of a given system on society. They should understand the implications of their work on privacy issues, as well as be able to perform a risk analysis that anticipates the power of networks to turn small mistakes into widely entrenched falsehoods.