This award supports participation of doctoral students in the Doctoral Consortium of the 25th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11) to be held on August 7-11, 2011 in San Francisco, CA. The Doctoral Consortium (DC) will be held on August 7-8. This award supports travel stipends for 13 US student participants and one-on-one mentoring lunches, a group dinner, and a poster session for all participants. The Doctoral Consortium will extend over two days and will include participant presentations, panel discussions, feedback to the participants from mentors, informal discussions (over lunch and during breaks), a group dinner for students and mentors, and a poster session. Each participant will give a 20-minute presentation that will be followed by 20 minutes of discussion led by an assigned mentor to provide feedback on the research and the presentation itself. To help the participants make the transition from being students to embarking on a research career, there will be a presentation on guidelines for developing a successful research program. In addition, there will be panel discussions addressing issues such as research strategies, job search, publishing, and establishing research funding.
The sixteenth annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium was held on August 7-8,2011, in conjunction with the twenty-fifth AAAI Conference on Artifiical Intelligence (AAAI-11) in San Francisco, California. At the Doctoral Consortium, 15 PhD students in AI presented their proposed research and discussed their plans and progress with a panel of faculty and industry researchers in AI, and with other graduate students. The primary goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to give students feedback on their work at a critical time in their research careers, hearing from independent, knowledgeable mentors within their field. The secondary goals of the Constorium include providing students with information about the value of different career objectives, and giving students opportunities to establish contacts with each other and with more senior researchers. The structure of the Doctoral Consortium consisted of three components: (1) presentations given by each PhD student, followed by discussion led by a mentor assigned to each student; (2) a presentation given by the chair of the Consortium on organizing a research program; and (3) two panels, allowing attendees to hear from both early career and senior researchers in AI on matters ranging from finding jobs, seeking funding, and balancing career and family. In summary, the Doctoral Consortium provided an invaluable opportunity for students to discuss their work with new and senior colleagues and to learn about important issues regarding the completion of graduate school and first steps in research careers.
