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 and immediately preceding the 22nd ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2009), to be held October 4-7 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The UIST conference is the premier international forum for presenting innovations in the software and technology of human computer interaction. It brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical and web user interfaces, tangible and ubiquitous computing, virtual and augmented reality, multimedia, new input and output devices, and computer-supported cooperative work. Although UIST is a long-standing annual conference, this workshop will be just the 7th doctoral research symposium associated with the conference (NSF has supported these events from their inception). The three goals of this full-day event 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 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 the field of user interface software and technology, 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, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field. The organizers of the event will make special efforts to attract students from institutions not historically heavily represented at UIST and to foster diversity across under-represented groups.
