This is funding to support attendance by approximately 15 graduate students in a doctoral consortium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the Eighth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI'06), to be held November 2-4, 2006 in Banff, Canada, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ICMI is the foremost conference representing the growing interest in next-generation perceptive, adaptive and multimodal user interfaces, systems, and applications, which 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. 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 in the field. The theme of this year's conference is multimodal collaboration through different platforms and applications; the conference will focus on major trends and challenges in this area, including distilling a roadmap for future research and commercial success. Participants in the doctoral consortium will receive feedback from an invited committee of half a dozen senior personnel to posters which reflect work-in-progress not mature enough for a full paper at ICMI; they will also get to present their work orally to the conference as a whole during a doctoral spotlight session highlighting top student research
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. Participants will be selected with the goal of increasing the conference's breadth and diversity; the organizers will make an effort to recruit members of traditionally under-represented groups including women, minorities, and people with disabilities, as well as from less well-funded institutions where adequate support for student conference attendance may be otherwise unavailable.
