This is funding to support attendance by approximately 25 advanced doctoral students from the United States and abroad at the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS 2010), which will take place June 14-18, 2010, in Pittsburgh. The first ITS conference was held in 1988 in Montreal, and they have continued every two years for the past 12 years in locations that include Brazil, Taiwan, France, and Canada as well as the United States. The ITS conferences offer a rare professional opportunity for interdisciplinary researchers from around the world to converge and present cutting-edge results from the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive and learning sciences, psychology, and educational technology. The goal is to promote studies in advanced systems in computer science applied to education, cognitive science and human learning for learners of all ages. To that end, the series provides a forum for the interchange of ideas in all areas of computer science and human learning, a unique environment in which researchers and practitioners exchange ideas, theories, experiments, techniques, applications and evaluations of initiatives supporting new developments relevant for the future. Comments and feedback from each previous ITS conference indicate that the carefully structured conference format continues to be professionally rewarding and stimulating to all who attend. ITS conferences are highly refereed international events and serve as reference guidelines for the research community; each paper is generally reviewed by 4 referees so that having a paper published at ITS is a reference of quality for any researcher evaluation. The conferences operate under the auspices of an independent nonprofit organization and are funded entirely by registration fees. More information about the conference is available at www.cmu.edu/its2010.
Students supported by NSF funds will have the opportunity to attend sessions with papers, posters, tutorials, workshops, and informal interactions with accomplished researchers, the latter within the framework of a Young Researchers Track that includes special sessions for the students to present their research ideas, meet peers who have related interests, and receive feedback and mentoring from senior members of the ITS community. A structured program will be provided in which each student is matched with a mentor who will be encouraged to offer feedback and support to students as they prepare their presentations, during the doctoral consortium sessions, and in at least one 1-on-1 meeting. The doctoral consortium will be situated within the main conference program in order to encourage maximal community involvement. Its structure will facilitate as much discussion and feedback as possible. With this goal in mind, students will present their work at lunchtime poster sessions open to all attendees. To avoid competition with other events and to maximize attendance, no other talks will be scheduled at this time and posters will be in the same rooms as the buffet lunch for all conference attendees. To acquaint attendees with student work, student poster sessions will be immediately preceded by "fire-hose" sessions where students summarize their work very briefly. To enable poster presenters to see and discuss each other's posters, poster presentations will span all 3 days of the main conference so as to give students one day to present their posters and two days to see others. Space and logistics permitting, presenters will be able to leave their posters up all 3 days of the conference, affording additional opportunities to discuss them with other researchers, for example during coffee breaks.
Broader Impacts: This activity supports one of NSF's core missions, to train more advanced professionals in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Participating in the conference will provide the selected students with a unique opportunity to be exposed to current research directions in different research communities both domestic and foreign. This is important for the field, because it has been recognized that transformative advances in research tend to derive from the melding of cross-disciplinary knowledge and multinational perspectives. Participants will be encouraged to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development, to form collaborative relationships, and to generate new research questions to be addressed during the coming years. The PI will place high priority on supporting young researchers (intermediate and advanced doctoral students) from degree-granting institutions that lack the funding necessary to support attendance by their students at international conferences such as ITS.
, held June 14-18 at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, PA, with 300 attendees from 22 countries. It paid for 17 graduate students from 10 universities to participate in the Young Researcher Track and Doctoral Consortium, and helped 21 additional graduate students from 15 universities to attend the conference. Young Researcher Track and Doctoral Consortium participants received individual mentoring from senior researchers, gave 1-minute plenary "firehose" talks to introduce their research, and presented it at a special poster session to showcase their work and get feedback from attendees. They and the other graduate students participated in the full schedule of conference events at www.cmu.edu/its2010. Their comments included: a great opportunity to meet and talk with other students a really good opportunity to get involved with the ITS community, create collaboration opportunities, share ideas and rethink my writing guidelines allowed me to attend both ITS and EDM Changed style of reading papers feedback from the mentoring and the poster presentation help Latin American community get closer and share projects how the best papers and presentations melded cognitive science, computer science and statistical analysis together to advance student learning I came to ITS2010 with a goal of advertising, a goal of investigating, and a goal of observing I got a bunch of responses from people I got very good ideas of how an excellent poster should be I learned from ITS2010 about how to frame, plan, perform, and communicate your own ITS research I made not only lots of professionals contacts but also many friends I was able to grasp the incredible extent and depth of ITS field I was impressed by the tutorial ideal to get feedback on my initial ideas for my thesis proposal it gave us very good visibility it helps to prepare the poster and presentation slides early it was great to see researchers from many fields working together to solve the same problem It was really nice to meet someone who is working on a very similar project with different perspective. Listened to lots of good talks and attended some great workshop sessions my first exposure to a lot of the research in the ITS area Networking is maybe the most important aspect of attending ITS2010 conferences as a young researcher opportunity to participate in this conference as a student volunteer sharing my research ideas early through a poster is important because I can get feedback and literature review for free spending time outside of the sessions with other conference attendees the best part of ITS was talking individually to presenters the topic of learning about learning is hot (again) tutorial, paper feedback, questions, positive and negative examples of talks, workshop, ... very informative about the community
