Career Planning

What types of jobs are available to students who graduate in cognitive systems?

Great question! A degree in Cognitive Systems will prepare you for entry into many fields of academia and industry. If you have a specific job in mind, you can choose a stream that best suits that industry - of course, by taking other courses in cognitive systems, you also will be prepared to work with others in other disciplines. The multi-disciplinary approach to the cognitive systems program will give you the ability to work across disciplines with people in other fields.

Here are some areas of industry currently related to cognitive systems:

Academia:

This is a general area - no matter what you decide to do in Cognitive Systems, if you want to pursue a graduate degree and then go the academic route - you’ll have many options available to you. Eventually, you’ll be working with some of the leading researchers and innovators of today, designing the tools of tomorrow. Why not get a head start by joining our team today and learning from some of the best.

Aerospace:

Cognitive systems actually has a wide range of applications in the world of engineering in general, but in aerospace engineering in particular it can be quite useful. An important component of any aerospace system is the control. How systems should make decisions, what the best controllers are, and topics concerning human-computer interaction are all discussed in cognitive systems. Imagine designing a new kind of HUD(heads-up-display) for private pilots that will allow greater flow of information and control of the aircraft!

Artificial Intelligence/Robotics:

To a robot, the world is an unforgiving and confusing place. Programming a robot to deal with the ambiguity and inconsistency of the world is quite a challenge. Harder still is determining how much information should the robot actually extract from the world - does it need to use a full video camera to “see” or will sonar suffice? If you decide to learn more about robotics and artificial intelligence while taking Cognitive Systems at UBC, you’ll find that there are many experts already working in this area. Since technology is improving so rapidly, the challenge now is not to make machines faster, or to give them more memory; rather, it is just to help make these systems more efficient and to give them the ability to use this information more effectively. Mathematics and statistics come into play here too - when we see the world, some studies are showing that we extract statistical properties of the world - we can approximate the number of things we are looking at, or get an idea of what we’re seeing even when we don’t get much visual information. If you’re interested in designing mathematical algorithms to extract information from the world, then you may want to also look into working in this area! This area will be heavily involved with computational intelligence in classifying data, recognizing file-types, and even computer vision. For example, in computer vision, it was discovered that by simply looking at how colours are organized in a photo, a computer can make an educated guess as to what the picture is about. If a photo has a lot of blue near the top half of the photo (sky) and a lot of greens and browns near the bottom half (earth), it’s likely a photo of nature.

Biotechnology/Medical Technology

Surgeons now have access to many different camera angles when they perform a surgery. They have robotic controls that allow them to manipulate surgical devices more accurately than ever before so that they can now perform surgeries with amazing precision. With such amazing visualization techniques and machines to do the surgeries, it’s getting to the point where the surgeon doesn’t even have to be in the room with the patient at all. Imagine the potential of this technology - with increasing bandwidth, a surgeon could be right here in Canada, performing an operation on someone say in India without ever leaving their living room. This type of innovation will rely on creating tools that really help the surgeon feel like they really were in the room with the patient. The challenge is to help combine tactile feedback systems that stimulate the sense of touch, with computer screens to give visual feedback, and even audio streams to let the surgeon hear what she’s doing.

Scientists in physiology and neuroscience are also using brain imaging techniques to map out the brain and find out what regions are most active when people are doing certain tasks. They are looking for the areas of the brain that are most active during epileptic seizures, or the areas of the brain most adversely affected by autism or Parkinson’s disease. If scientists can understand how the neurons in the brain help keep other neurons in check, they may be able to design smart microchips that could replace dysfunctional neurons and treat such ailments. Even the domain of prosthetic limbs enjoys the developments of cognitive systems - imagine an artificial leg that was so intuitive to control that it could replace the missing leg of an amputee! These possible applications only scratch the surface of the types of research in cognitive systems. It’s becoming increasingly clear that this will be a booming area of research and development.

Consulting

Because of the multidisciplinary nature of cognitive systems, you learn to connect a lot of disparate ideas, as well as practical applications of those ideas. Through this, you gain an extremely valuable transferable skill: problem solving. Depending on your particular topic of interest, you could go to work for companies by solving problems for them! Perhaps you could consult for a firm about the usability problems with programs they’re using to teach their employees, or maybe you could analyze the system they’re using to pass information around the company and determine where it could use some tuning up. The possibilities are endless in the world of consulting.

Customer/Technical Support

Speaking of problem solving, if you like to do that and help people, you could work in customer/tech support. Depending on your area of interest, you could go to work the phones for a software company or for a hospital information desk, or at a company that develops intelligent home appliances!

Databases

Organizing, sorting, and retrieving data efficiently and easily is a perpetual problem for pretty much every company you might think of. In cognitive systems, solutions to this problem are discussed from a whole lot of different angles. Consider some problems you might face when working for a company: what’s the best algorithm for sorting a particular kind or set of data (financial data VS library archives, for example)? How should you design the user interface based on data given to you by human resources? How much of the searching process should be automated, and how customizable should you make it, and how intelligent could you make it? These questions are of interest in cognitive systems.

Human-Computer Interaction

In recent years, people have started using computers for everything from gaming to keeping track of their plans to doing research to driving. There is an obvious market for designing computer interfaces that take into account the people using them! Imagine determining the best way to display warning messages, or researching the self-extending effects of driving a car, or designing new joysticks to control wheelchairs.

Human Factors/Usability Testing

Closely related to human-computer interaction is this field, in which the human factor is considered when designing and testing products. The human cognitive system plays an important part in how comfortable they will be with using it, and training in cognitive systems prepares you for dealing with human factors: such as how consumers might perceive a certain design, or whether a control scheme is intuitive or not. After creating possible products, psychological testing can be done to see how well people use them, or how much they like them.

The employment opportunities are endless...

An obvious advantage of the Cognitive Systems Program is career flexibility. While you will be prepared to work in whatever stream you choose, you will also have exposure to the other disciplines of the program. That makes graduates of Cognitive Systems highly sought by industry and academia. Currently, the most frequent job placements are in the areas of cognitive engineering (human factors), human-computer interface design, artificial intelligence, neural network applications, software design and development, and Internet startups. There is also a growing demand in neuroscience, biotech, pharmaceuticals, to name a few!

On another note, please check our links area frequently as we often feature companies and press releases about recent developments in Cognitive Systems.
These should give you an idea about the diversity that this degree entails.

You can also read about different ways COGS is being used in the world by checking out the different links of the week. If you’d like to discuss some of the cool things going on, please visit our forums!