VL/HCC'08 Doctoral Consortium

这项资金将用于支持一个由10名有前途的研究生组成的博士联盟（研讨会），以及一个由杰出的研究人员组成的小组，该小组将与2008年IEEE视觉语言和以人为中心的计算研讨会（VL/HCC 08）一起举行，该研讨会将于9月16日至20日在德国安默河畔的Herrsching举行，由IEEE计算机协会赞助。在过去的十年里，人的多样性和普遍性？美国的目标、相互作用和对信息系统的关注急剧增加。交互式计算机软件现在渗透到许多个人中。人们越来越依赖计算机和信息系统来进行休闲和家庭活动。因此，终端用户现在期望在与计算机软件的交互中具有相当大的灵活性和可控性。对许多人来说，仅仅使用由专业软件业开发的打包软件和脚本任务已经不够了；他们现在必须为各种各样的问题提供自己的计算解决方案，包括电子表格模型、网站、教育媒体和模拟、自动化业务流程和科学可视化。为了生产这样的软件，即使是针对特定领域的问题，最终用户也必须超越与计算机的表面交互，并获得计算思维的概念模型和技能。但是，目前终端用户在计算思维方面的进步并没有均匀地分布在所有人群中。那么，今年呢？VL/HCC博士联盟是本系列中由NSF资助的第六个，将致力于将计算思维的好处扩展到不同的人群。参与者将探讨不同的通信媒体、表示和解决问题的支持如何影响最终用户？愿意并有能力访问、操作和编程解决他们的工作或日常问题。弱势群体的特殊需要是什么？如何设计计算解决问题的工具和设备来满足这些需求？研讨会将汇集并建立一个社区，让年轻的研究人员从计算机科学、社会科学和教育等不同领域的角度来研究这些问题的不同方面。它将通过为研究领域的专家（以及他们的同行）提供给他们建议的机会来指导这些新研究人员的工作，因为学生参与者将在研讨会期间正式展示他们的工作，并将收到教师小组的反馈。反馈是为了帮助学生理解和阐明他们的工作相对于其他人机交互研究是如何定位的，他们的主题是否充分关注论文研究项目，他们的方法是否正确选择和应用，以及他们的结果是否得到适当的分析和呈现。每位与会者的工作的一份2页的扩展摘要将在会议论文集中发表。PI预计，获得该奖项的大部分学生将来自美国大学，但与往年一样，由于研究界的高度国际化，少数非美国学生将获得奖学金。学生也可能被邀请参加。更广泛的影响：研讨会将有助于形成正在进行和未来的研究项目，旨在缓解与我们社会中许多人相关的紧迫问题。本次活动将促进发现和学习，通过鼓励学生研究人员探索困难和具有挑战性的开放问题，通过知名研究人员小组的参与，他们的任务是提供建设性的反馈，以及通过其他与会者的参与，他们也将向学生和彼此学习并提供额外的反馈。组委会成员将通过学术关系参与个人招聘过程，以鼓励非技术系和少数族裔院校的学生参与。

This is funding to support a doctoral consortium (workshop) for about 10 promising graduate students, along with a panel of distinguished research faculty, which will take place in conjunction with the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 08), to be held September 16-20 in Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. Over the past decade, the diversity and ubiquity of people?s goals, interactions, and concerns with information systems have increased dramatically. Interactive computer software now permeates many individuals? working lives, and people are increasingly relying on computing and information systems for leisure and home activities as well. As a result, end users now expect considerable flexibility and control in their interactions with computer software. For many, it is no longer sufficient to consume the packaged software and scripted tasks developed by the professional software industry; they now must produce their own computational solutions to a wide variety of problems, including spreadsheet models, web sites, educational media and simulations, automated business procedures, and scientific visualizations. To produce such software, even for domain-specific problems, end users must look beyond surface-level interaction with computers and acquire the conceptual models and skills of computational thinking. But current advances toward computational thinking by end users are not evenly distributed across all segments of the population. Thus, this year?s VL/HCC doctoral consortium, the sixth to be funded by NSF in this series, will focus on expanding the benefits of computational thinking to diverse populations. Participants will explore how varying communication media, representations, and problem-solving support affect end users? willingness and ability to access, manipulate, and program solutions to their work or everyday problems. What are the special needs of disadvantaged populations? How can computational problem-solving tools and devices be designed to meet these needs? The workshop will bring together and build community among young researchers working on different aspects of these problems from the perspectives of diverse fields including computer science, the social sciences, and education. It will guide the work of these new researchers by providing an opportunity for experts in the research field (as well as their peers) to give them advice, in that 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. A 2-page extended abstract of each participant's work will be published in the conference proceedings. The PI expects that most of the students supported by this award will come from U.S. universities, but as in past years, due to the highly international make-up of the research community, a few non-U.S. students may be invited to participate as well. 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. Members of the organizing committee will engage in a personal recruitment process through academic connections, in an effort to encourage participation by students in non-technology departments as well as from minority institutions.