VL/HCC'04 Doctoral Consortium

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This is funding to support a research event (workshop) for 10-14 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with distinguished research faculty, which will take place in conjunction with the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'04), to be held September 26-28 in Rome, Italy, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. Our society has evolved into two distinct classes: the information haves and have-nots. Because information is power, this class distinction is a highly effective barrier to the ability of the have-nots to advance in terms of career and influence, both individually and in groups. The development of programming tools that allow end users to operate on task information (e.g., via complex queries and manipulations) may increase this gap even more. It will no longer be enough to find and use information others create; increasingly, employees and citizens will be expected to generate and manipulate information in creative ways to solve complex problems. There is an urgent need to consider the accessibility of these more powerful information tools, before the gap between the haves and have-nots becomes too great to cross. We need to design for inclusiveness as we envision and build programming tools for end users, so that everyone will have the opportunity to benefit from the power that they offer. That is the theme of this year's doctoral consortium, the second funded by NSF in this series. The event will bring together and build community among young researchers working on different aspects of the research problem, whether their "home" research community is in Computer Science, Sociology, or Education. The workshop will emphasize to attendees (both the graduate students immediately involved and general conference participants) the crosscutting nature of research relevant to this pressing research problem, which has received almost no prior study. Goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction 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. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the conference proceedings, which has wide print and electronic distribution. The conference steering committee will evaluate the workshop outcome, and the results will be made available to the organizers of possible similar future events.Broader Impacts: The workshop will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at alleviating a pressing problem of relevance to a great many people within our society. This event will promote discovery and learning, by encouraging the student researchers to explore a difficult and challenging open problem, through involvement of a panel of well-known researchers whose task is to provide constructive feedback, and through inclusion of other conference participants who will also learn from and provide additional feedback to the students and to each other.