Center for Information Technology and Society

CITS is dedicated to research and education about the cultural transitions and social innovations associated with technology, particularly in the highly dynamic environments that seem so pervasive in organizations and societies today. We also work to improve engineering through infusing social insights into the innovative process.

Faculty associated with our Center bring their diverse disciplinary perspectives—which range from Art and English to Sociology and Communication to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering—into conversation, forwarding cutting edge research across the engineering sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

Our research initiatives are equally diverse, ranging from ground-breaking research on social computing, to the role and effectiveness of technology in the classroom, to the role of technology in organizing community events. We study these and other relationships from the U.S. to Mongolia, and places in between.

CITS was founded at UC Santa Barbara in 1999, on the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the Internet. UC Santa Barbara is nationally acclaimed for its success in multi-disciplinary research, and provides a perfect home CITS's wide scope of inquiry and education. The Center is housed in the campus Office of Research, as a unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. CITS is funded by private gifts, the university, and research grants.