WORKSHOP: Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing Conference 2010 Doctoral Consortium: Democratizing Computational Tools

这笔资金用于支持约10名研究生的博士联盟(研讨会)，以及一个由4名杰出研究教师导师组成的小组，该小组将与2010年IEEE视觉语言和以人为中心的计算研讨会(VL/HCC2010)一起举行，该研讨会将于2010年9月21-25日在西班牙马德里举行，由IEEE计算机学会赞助。长期运行的VL/HCC系列在人机界面和编程语言会议中占有独特的地位，因为它专门关注如何帮助最终用户成功开发和使用软件。人们对信息系统的目标、互动和关注的多样性和无处不在的程度在不断增加。交互式计算机软件不仅渗透到许多人的工作生活中，人们通常也依赖于计算机和信息系统来进行休闲和家庭活动。因此，终端用户现在希望在他们与计算机软件的交互中具有相当大的灵活性和控制力。对于许多人来说，使用专业软件行业开发的套装软件和脚本任务已经不够；他们现在必须为各种问题创建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、自动化业务程序和可视化。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级别的交互，并获得概念模型和计算思维的技能。但是，目前终端用户在计算思维方面的进步并不均匀地分布在人口的所有部分。因此，今年的VL/HCC博士联盟将专注于将计算思维的好处扩展到不同的人群，这是该系列中由NSF资助的第八届。确保计算语言和工具的设计者考虑到信息技术历来被忽视的人群的需求，将增加这些个人/群体能够学习和使用更强大的工具的机会，这些工具正迅速成为信息素养的关键。与此同时，这样的努力可能会导致研究人员识别新的软件构建隐喻和技术，以更广泛地提高他们的语言和环境的可用性。研讨会的主要目标是激发研究生和其他研究人员思考不同的通信媒体、表达方式和问题解决支持如何影响最终用户访问、操作和编程解决其工作或日常问题的解决方案的意愿和能力。弱势群体的特殊需求是什么？如何设计计算问题解决工具和设备来满足这些需求？研讨会将从计算机科学、社会科学和教育等不同领域的不同角度研究这些问题的不同方面的年轻研究人员聚集在一起，并建立社区。它将指导这些新研究人员的工作，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，因为学生参与者将在研讨会期间正式介绍他们的工作，并将收到教员小组的反馈。这些反馈旨在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的定位，他们的主题是否足够集中于论文研究项目，他们的方法是否得到正确的选择和应用，以及结果是否得到适当的分析和展示。与前几年一样，VL/HCC2010年博士联盟将是定期会议方案的一部分。会议记录中将公布每个参与者的两页长的工作摘要。更广泛的影响：研讨会将有助于形成正在进行的和未来的研究项目，旨在缓解与我们社会中的许多人相关的紧迫问题。这一活动将通过鼓励学生研究人员探索一个困难和具有挑战性的开放问题，通过一个任务是提供建设性反馈的知名研究人员小组的参与，以及通过吸收其他与会者，他们也将向学生和彼此学习并提供额外的反馈，来促进发现和学习。国际和平协会和组织委员会成员将特别努力吸引不同的、跨学科的学生参与者群体，并特别注意招募妇女和少数群体。国际学生联合会预计，该奖项资助的大部分学生将来自美国的大学，但与过去几年一样，由于研究界的高度国际化构成，少数非美国学生可能也会被邀请参加。作为本系列之前研讨会成功的证明，值得注意的是，过去的参与者中有三人现在担任终身教职，其中包括PI。

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for about 10 graduate students, along with a panel of 4 distinguished research faculty mentors, which will take place in conjunction with the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2010), to be held September 21-25, 2010, in Madrid, Spain, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. The long-running VL/HCC series occupies a unique niche among HCI and Programming Language conferences, in that it focuses specifically on how to help end users successfully develop and use software. The diversity and ubiquity of people's goals, interactions, and concerns with information systems is continually increasing. Not only does interactive computer software permeate many individuals' working lives, people commonly rely 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 create their own computational solutions to a wide variety of problems, including spreadsheet models, web sites, educational media and simulations, automated business procedures, and 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 eighth to be funded by NSF in this series, will focus on expanding the benefits of computational thinking to diverse populations. Ensuring that designers of computational languages and tools consider the needs of populations historically overlooked in information technology will increase the chance that these individuals/groups are able to learn and use the more powerful tools that are fast becoming essential to information literacy. At the same time, such efforts may lead researchers to identify new software construction metaphors and techniques that increase the usability of their languages and environments more generally. The workshop's primary goal is to stimulate graduate students' and other researchers' thinking about 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 a 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 the results are appropriately analyzed and presented. As in prior years the VL/HCC 2010 Doctoral Consortium will be part of the regular conference program. A 2-page extended abstract of each participant's work will be published in the conference proceedings. 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. The PI and the members of the organizing committee will make special efforts to attract a diverse and interdisciplinary group of student participants, with special attention paid to recruitment of women and minorities. 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. As a testament to the success of previous workshops in this series, it is noteworthy that three of the past participants now hold tenure-track faculty positions, including the PI.