This travel grant supports senior PhD students who are nearing graduation to take part in a doctoral consortium at the 2012 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). The doctoral consortium highlights the work of these up and coming researchers, and pairs each student with a senior member of the computer vision community who serves as their mentor. The mentorship process provides each student with valuable feedback on their research, as well as meaningful career advice as the students move on to the next phase of their professional development. The doctoral consortium event aims to have representation from a diverse group of participants (in terms of gender, ethnic background, academic institution and geographic location). The travel grant ensures participation from a broad range of institutions across the country and gives visibility to a diverse population of students.
The goal of this project was to host a "doctoral consortium" at the IEEE CVPR 2012 conference, the premier computer vision conference in North America. The doctoral consortium is an event where graduating PhD students present their research to an invited committee of academic and industry research leaders. These leaders, including one mentor specifically paired to each student, can offer candid feedback on research and career at a critical point in the career of young researchers. The student participants applied to take part in the doctoral consortium in the spring of 2012. PI Hays selected 33 participants (20 domestic and 13 international) and then paired them with leaders of the research community from academia and industry who volunteered their time to mentor the next generation of scientists. Student participants were given travel awards to offset some of the costs of attending the CVPR scientific conference and to encourage diversity by allowing students from institutions which might not otherwise be able to support their travel. Most broadly, the doctoral consortium strengthens the CVPR conference which in turn has a positive impact on the scientific community. This in turn has a positive impact on society as a whole, given the importance of image and video understanding to many societal problems, from robotics to healthcare to entertainment to security. The event was held during the summer of 2012 and feedback from numerous participants was very positive. Students were especially grateful to get one on one feedback from leaders of the community. This feedback will help shape the direction of future research. It will also help young researchers navigate the transition from student to full time scientist, either in industry or academia.
