This is funding to support a doctoral research symposium (workshop) of approximately 8 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with the 19th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2006), to be held October 15-18 in Montreux, Switzerland, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The UIST conference is the premiere forum for presenting research results and innovations in the software and technology of human computer interaction. It brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical user interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, multimedia, new input and output devices, CSCW, ubiquitous computing and others. UIST is a long-standing annual conference, which will be meeting for the 18th time in October, but this workshop will be just the third doctoral research symposium associated with the conference. The three goals of the workshop are to increase the exposure and visibility of the participants' work within the community, to help establish a sense of community among this next generation of researchers, and to help foster their research efforts by providing substantive feedback and guidance from a group of senior researchers in the area in a supportive and interactive environment. 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 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. Student position papers will be published in the UIST Conference Companion, and the students will also present posters relating to their work at a special session the first night of the conference.
Broader Impacts: The doctoral symposium will help expand the participation of young researchers pursuing graduate studies in this field, by providing them an opportunity to gain wider exposure in the community for their innovative work and to obtain feedback and guidance from senior members of the research community. It will further help foster a sense of community among these young researchers, by allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Because the students and faculty constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, including nationality/cultural and scientific discipline, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field.
