Workshop: UIST 2012 Doctoral Symposium

This is funding to support a doctoral research symposium (workshop) of approximately 8 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad (no more than one, to broaden the horizons of the U.S. participants), along with about 4 distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with and immediately preceding the 25th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2012), to be held October 6-10 in Cambridge, MA, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The annual UIST conference is the premier international forum for presenting innovative research results as well as implementation experiences in the software and technology of human computer interaction. It brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical and web user interfaces, tangible and ubiquitous computing, virtual and augmented reality, multimedia, new input and output devices, and computer-supported cooperative work. More information about the conference may be found at http://www.acm.org/uist.

This year's doctoral research symposium will be just the 10th such workshop associated with the UIST conferences (NSF has offered support for these events from their inception). The three goals of this full-day event are to increase the exposure and visibility of the participants' work within the community, to help establish a sense of community among this next generation of researchers, and to help foster their research efforts by providing substantive feedback and guidance from a group of senior researchers in a supportive and interactive environment. To these ends, student participants will each make formal 20-minute presentations of their work to the group, to be followed by an extensive discussion lasting approximately 30 minutes during which they will receive feedback from a faculty panel; the feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. The students will also present their research to a wider audience through posters at the conference poster reception, brief overviews during the conference overview session, and short papers in the UIST Adjunct Proceedings.

Broader Impacts: The doctoral symposium will help expand the participation of young researchers pursuing graduate studies in the vital field of user interface software and technology, by providing them an opportunity to gain wider exposure in the community for their innovative work and to obtain feedback and guidance from senior members of the research community. It will also foster a sense of community among these young researchers, by allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Because the students and faculty constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field. The organizers of the event will make special efforts to attract students from institutions not historically heavily represented at UIST and to foster diversity across under-represented groups. To further increase participant diversity, the organizers will use NSF funds to support no more than one student from any single institution.