The Doctoral Consortium funded by this project is a three-day event to be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition to be held on March 21-23, 2011, in Santa Barbara, California. Attendees include graduate students nearing completion of their dissertations who have been accepted to the consortium. Each recent Ph.D. graduate or soon to be graduate chosen to participate in the consortium is paired with a senior researcher who serves as his/her mentor during the conference. Each participant also presents his/her research at a doctoral Consortium luncheon open to participants and mentors and also presents his/her research in a poster session open to all attendees of the conference. Participants also have a travel budget to defray all or part of their expenses incurred in attending the conference and consortium. The consortium provides talented young researchers the opportunity to discuss their work formally and informally with both their peers and senior researchers. These interactions with others coming from different research labs with different viewpoints typically strengthen the ability of young researchers to communicate the value of their own work and to set their work more clearly in the broader context of the research field as a whole.
The National Science Foundation provided support to the Doctoral Consortium held in conjunction with the 2011 IEEE Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition Conference. This financial support in turn was used to defray travel and lodging costs for ten doctoral students selected to participate in the Doctoral Consortium. The ten selected to participate were drawn from a pool of 28 applicants from eleven different countries around the world. The goals of the Doctoral Consortium include promoting contacts among Ph.D. students and to foster one-on-one mentoring relationships between young researchers completing their dissertations and senior researchers in the field. As part of organizing the consortium, each participant was paired with a senior member of the research community and these students and mentors met directly during the conference, for example going out to dinner together. In addition, a formal luncheon was held on the middle day of the conference where discussion leaders oversaw round-table discussions between groups of participants and mentors working in related areas. The luncheon also included a panel of senior researchers fielding questions from participants. The consortium organizers, along with most senior researchers, believe opportunities such as this are critical to the professional development of young researchers as they begin to expand awareness and appreciation for their research beyond the confines of the schools where they are completing their degrees.
