WORKSHOP: VL/HCC'05 Doctoral Consortium

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This is funding to support a doctoral consortium for 10-14 promising graduate students from the United States, along with distinguished research faculty, and up to 5 non-U.S. students (who will be invited to participate without financial support), which will take place in conjunction with the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'05), to be held September 21-24 in Dallas, Texas, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. Our society has evolved into two distinct classes: the information haves and have-nots. Recent advances in mobile computing and multi-sensory technologies provide great opportunities for reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots by enhancing access to information technology for the latter group, but there are significant challenges as well. Only if computers, hand-held devices, and the Web are easily accessible by all will universal end-user programming be possible. But easy access implies a need to look beyond traditional keyboard and mouse interaction styles. Thus, the focus of this year's VL/HCC doctoral consortium, the third to be funded by NSF in this series, is on how designers of digital devices and environments can better address universal access issues through multiple modes of interaction. Participants in this event will explore multimodal and multimedia interaction between human and computers, between human and the Web, and between human and human. 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 too little prior attention. 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.