This is funding to support attendance by approximately 15 graduate students in a doctoral consortium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI'04), to be held October 13-15, 2004 in State College, PA, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The 3-day conference will bring together researchers from academia and industry from around the world to present and discuss the latest multi-disciplinary work on multimodal interfaces, systems, and applications. The conference represents the growing interest in next-generation perceptive, adaptive and multimodal user interfaces. These new interfaces are especially well suited for interpreting natural communication and activity patterns in real-world environments; their emergence represents a radical departure from previous computing, and is rapidly transforming the nature of human-computer interaction by creating more natural, expressively powerful, flexible and robust means of interacting with computers. Participants in the doctoral consortium will receive feedback from an invited committee of 3-5 senior personnel to posters which reflect work-in-progress not mature enough for a full paper at ICMI.
Broader Impacts: The doctoral consortium will give students exposure to their new research community, both by presenting their own work and by observing and interacting with established professionals in the field. It will encourage students at this critical time in their careers to begin building a social support network of peers and mentors. The organizers will make a special effort to recruit student participants from less well-funded institutions, where adequate support for student conference attendance may be otherwise unavailable. Participation by members of traditionally under-represented groups, including women, minority students, people with disabilities and veterans, will be strongly encouraged.
