This is funding to support a Doctoral Colloquium (workshop) of promising doctoral students and distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with this year's IEEE VisWeek Conference, which will take place October 11-16, 2009, in Atlantic City, NJ. Visualization, or the use of interactive graphics to support data analysis and understanding, has become an integral part and critical component of many application areas. VisWeek consists of three main events: IEEE Visualization (Vis), IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis), and the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology Symposium (VAST). IEEE Vis is the oldest of the three venues of VisWeek, and will celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. Its traditional focus has been on a wide range of topics in scientific and medical visualization. InfoVis centers around helping people explore or explain abstract data through interactive software that exploits the capabilities of the human perceptual system, focusing on cognitively useful spatial mappings of abstract datasets that are not inherently spatial, and accompanying the mappings with interaction techniques that allow people to intuitively explore the data. VAST, the youngest event, was founded in 2006 to address the growing interest in the science of analytical reasoning supported by highly interactive visual interfaces; its focus is on visual analytics tools and techniques to synthesize information into knowledge, derive insight from massive, dynamic, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected, provide timely, defensible, and understandable assessments, and communicate assessments effectively for action. IEEE VisWeek is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry, bringing together about 800 researchers and practitioners from around the world with a shared interest in techniques, tools, and technology. The papers published in the special conference issue of IEEE Transactions of Visualization and Computer Graphics are rigorously refereed and widely cited.
The Doctoral Colloquium at IEEE VisWeek 2009 will bring together approximately 12 dissertation stage doctoral students in the field of visualization, from the United States and abroad, who will come together on Saturday, October 10, for a day of discussions and interaction with 6 faculty researchers, with follow-up events that will take place during the conference?s technical program. A primary goal of the colloquium is to allow students to discuss their research directions in a supportive atmosphere with a panel of distinguished leaders and with their peers, who will provide helpful feedback and fresh perspectives. The colloquium also supports community building, by connecting beginning and advanced researchers so as to build a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues across the world. Student research will be disseminated via posters during the VisWeek 2009 technical program, and via extended abstracts published in the VisWeek 2009 Extended Abstracts. Feedback about the Doctoral Colloquium will be provided to future conference committees. The PI has affirmed that in managing this event he and his colleagues will try explicitly to identify and include the broadest possible group of highly qualified participants, and that they will ensure that NSF funds are used chiefly to support participation by students enrolled in graduate programs in the United States.
Broader Impacts: The VisWeek Doctoral Colloquium has taken place annually at the Visualization conference since 2006, and has helped launch the careers of a number of outstanding young Vis researchers. It brings together the best of the next generation of visualization researchers, and allows them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers, which plays a major role in their enculturation into the profession. Since the students and faculty are a diverse group on several dimensions (nationality, scientific discipline, research specialization), the students' horizons are broadened at a critical stage in their professional development.
