Iovine and Young Academy’s new Bachelor of Science in Human Technology Interaction will welcome its first class of students this fall. The new degree will teach students to apply new technology in human-centered contexts, according to an announcement Dec. 22 from IYA.

Thanassis Rikakis, former dean of IYA and one of the lead faculty in the Human Technology Interaction Lab, said while most technology programs aim to figure out the next thing technology can do, the HTI degree will allow students to learn what humans can do with the assistance of technology. 

“We are about 21st-century creativity … creating new types of human experiences and new types of human activities through the help of new technologies and new types of businesses,” Rikakis said. 

Josh Kun, inaugural vice provost for the arts and interim dean of IYA, said the HTI degree will offer electives across various other schools, including Viterbi School of Engineering, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“What I like about the HTI degree is you’ve got the interdisciplinary courses that IYA offers across business, technology and design,” Kun said. “Then you also have possibilities for electives across Dornsife, across Annenberg, that allow students to add to the breadth of their learning … [and] to continue to flex their muscles as human thinkers.”

Maia Rocha, a freshman majoring in arts, technology and the business of innovation, was planning to apply for USC’s computer science program until she found out about the HTI degree, and she said she has now joined the inaugural cohort.

“[The program] felt like the perfect combination of two worlds, where I’d get the hard technical skills of computer science, while still being able to be entrepreneurial and pursue design and business,” Rocha said.

Rocha said she is eager to take classes from the different schools covered in the HTI degree program.

“There’s an elective that I’m really looking forward to,” Rocha said. “It’s User Experience, which is very in line with human-technology interaction, very [user interface]-, UX-based, very hands-on.”

Rikakis said the HTI degree program emphasizes interdisciplinary excellence and provides students with the opportunity to attain interdisciplinary expertise. He said the new degree program “stay[s] committed to the full spectrum” of the entire product innovation process.

“There are new forms of cross-cutting expertise that are emerging, which is about how to combine different components to actually address the challenge,” Rikakis said. “I can say [with] fairly good confidence that in terms of covering the whole product innovation space, we have the best school in the United States.”

According to the course catalogue, the curriculum has a technology requirement that offers students the choice between extended reality, interactive artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and physical computing, and web and app development areas. Rikakis said students will learn the necessary technological basics before tailoring their curriculum to narrower interests.

“This idea of having people pick [an application] is not because we’re trying to limit anybody’s creativity,” Rikakis said. “We are encouraging students to do that simply so we can get good at something.”

Rikakis said the ideas of a degree like the HTI program were loosely conceived in the early years of IYA. He said the process of finalizing the new program was accelerated as a result of the societal impacts driven by technological advancement.

“[We have] come to have this evolution of AI pushing new frontiers about what happens next,” Rikakis said. “Some jobs might go away. Some amazing new jobs can occur. We were pressed to move fast.”

When asked about the new degree’s connection with recent advancements in artificial intelligence, Kun said the new program attempts to train students to be forward-looking while meeting the demands of the moment and avoids encouraging students to “put all [their] eggs in an AI basket.”

“A degree that is framed as being about not just technology, but the interaction between technology and the human. To me, in my mind, that is an important statement,” Kun said. 

Kiyomi Miura contributed to this report.