This is funding to support participation by approximately 15 graduate students currently enrolled in Ph.D. programs in the United States and abroad in the 2009 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2009), to be held in Sanibel Island, Florida, on February 8-11, 2009. Sponsored by ACM, the annual IUI conferences are the premier forum where researchers from academia and industry, who work at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), come together to exchange complementary insights and to present and discuss outstanding research and applications whose goal is to make the computerized world a more amenable place. Unlike traditional AI the focus is not so much on making the computer smart all by itself, but rather on making the interaction between computers and people smarter. Unlike traditional HCI, there is a focus on solutions that involve large amounts of knowledge and emerging technologies such as natural language understanding, brain computer interfaces, and gesture recognition. To this end, IUI encourages contributions not only from computer science but also from related fields such as psychology, cognitive science, computer graphics, the arts, etc. IUI 2009 will be the 12th conference in the series; topics of interest this year include user input, generation of system output, ubiquitous computing, help, categories of intelligence, IUI design, and user studies. NSF funds will be used to support two groups of participants: students who are the primary author of a submission that has been accepted as a full paper or poster but whose institution is either unable to provide any funding for conference attendance or able to provide only partial funding that is insufficient to cover the student?s expenses; and other students who would benefit from the conference but who would be unable to attend due to restrictions by their department on funding conference travel for non-authors. The IUI 2009 organizing committee has undertaken to proactively recruit student participants from schools that have not traditionally been well represented in the IUI community, and also that the bulk of students supported (70-80%) will be from U.S. institutions.
Broader Impacts: This funding will enable attendance at this conference by students who might otherwise be unable to do so for financial reasons. It will enhance the educational experience of funded participants, by bringing them into contact with leading researchers in the field and by exposing them to the lively discussion during the course of the conference that often leads to opportunities for career advancement. The quality of the conference itself will be enhanced as well, thanks to a broadening of the base of institutions represented and increased diversity of participants. The rich exchange of ideas at IUI has previously proven to be a valuable source of ideas for future research, as well as leading to collaborative efforts; this funding will extend the opportunities for collaboration and provide intellectual stimulus to programs that have previously sent few or no representatives to this conference.
