This is funding to support a doctoral research symposium (workshop) of approximately 12 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad (up to 2 international students), along with 4 high profile faculty and industrial researchers. The event will take place in conjunction with and immediately preceding the 7th Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference (ITS ?12), to be held November 11-14, 2012, in Cambridge Mass., and which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery. The technological advances of the past decade have given rise to an increasing number of creative research areas that seek to overcome the long-standing separation between the physical and digital worlds. The ITS Conferences are a premiere venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies, bringing together about 200 top researchers, engineers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and human aspects of ITS technology; so topics of interest include not only innovations in ITS hardware and software but also expanding our understanding of design considerations for ITS technologies and their applications. More information about the conference may be found at http://its2012conf.org.
The primary goal of the ITS Doctoral Symposium is to provide mentorship for future leaders in this growing field. To these ends the event is designed so as to encourage young scholars from diverse backgrounds encompassed by ITS to attend the conference, meet with more senior researchers, and pursue a career in this field. The day-long program will help establish a sense of community among the next generation of researchers, while increasing the exposure and visibility of the participants' work and at the same time fostering their research efforts by providing constructive feedback and guidance from senior researchers in a supportive and interactive environment. Student participants will each make a formal presentation of their work to the group, with ample time allotted for questions and feedback from the faculty panel as well as from the other student participants. 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. Additional opportunities for more informal discussion and networking will be during the doctoral symposium's lunch and dinner events. Students' short papers will appear in the ITS Proceedings and they will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. Students will also be invited to present their work at the main conference during the Poster Session; this will also afford the opportunity for students to talk one-on-one with peers and other more senior researchers, in addition to the focused mentoring of the Doctoral Symposium itself.
Broader Impacts: Student participants will be selected on the basis of written submissions in the form of a six page ACM format paper submitted to the Doctoral Symposium chairs. These will be reviewed by the faculty panel and external reviewers. Participants will be expected to be pursuing a doctoral degree and will be selected primarily from the field of human-computer interaction, which could span a variety of disciplines including computer science, engineering, or a design background. The review and decision of acceptance will balance many factors including the quality of the proposals. The event organizers are committed to diversity across backgrounds, gender, topics, and institutions, as well as to the inclusion of students from underrepresented minorities. To assure broad coverage of topics and backgrounds, no more than two students will be accepted from any given institution and no more than one with any given advisor. NSF funds will be used primarily to support student participants from U.S. institutions, with no more than two educational institutions from abroad.
Major Goals The goal of this grant was to support student participation in the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces conference (ITS’12) that was held in November 11-15, 2012 at Cambridge, MA (http://its2012conf.org). The grant supported participants in the ITS'12 Doctoral Symposium, student travel scholarships, and student volunteers. The ACM conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS’12) brought together researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds and interest areas to exchange research results and experiences. Overall 30 papers were presented (29% acceptance rate) on the following topics: Multiple Displays and Devices Interaction in 3D Surfaces in the wild Free-space Interactions with TVs and Projected Displays Surfaces in education Pen and Paper-based interaction Interaction Techniques and Widgets Interacting with Information Using Surfaces Understanding surface users In addition, 32 demos and posters were presented. Selected demo presentations from ITS’12 were presented to wide audience in the May/June 2013 Interactions Magazine: http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/demo-hour24. Outcomes Overall, 23 students were supported by this grant: 5 Doctoral Symposium participants, 8 travel scholarship recipients, and 10 student volunteers. Among these students, 12 were female, 9 were undergraduate students. Funded students came from diverse backgrounds including underrepresented groups in computing and from various institutions including: Northwestern University, University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), Georgia Tech, Louisiana State University, Wellesley College, Harvard University, Olin College, MIT, Stanford University, and Texas A&M. The grant also supported the ITS Doctoral Symposium (DS), which is modeled after similar highly successful gatherings, e.g. at the UIST, CHI, DIS, CSCW, and C&C conferences. Its aim is to broaden participation in the interactive tabletops and surfaces academic community by providing mentorship for young scientists, researchers, and designers in this field. It is a one-day event, which provides a forum for students in the field to meet each other and to discuss and review their work with one another and with a panel of experienced ITS researchers. It also gives them the opportunity to meet and engage with more senior ITS researchers during the main conference event. The ITS’12 DS was held on November 11, 2012. Five students (2 female) were invited and participated in the DS. The students presented their work to each other and to the four faculty mentors in an informal and interactive setting. The mentors provided feedback on each student's written and oral presentation, and lead a discussion of the work, questions or hypotheses addressed, research and design methods, potential findings, and significance to the ITS field. The 2012 faculty mentors were: Raimund Dachselt, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany Mark Hancock, The University of Waterloo, Canada Ali Mazalek, Georgia Tech, USA Sheelagh Carpendale, University of Calgary, Canada Five participants (2 female) were invited to participate in the ITS’12 DS. Participants presented research projects at the intersection of design, engineering and sciences: Perception and Reality: Exploring Urban Planners’ Vision on GIS Tasks for Multi-Touch Displays, Rojin Vishkaie, University of Calgary, Canada Scalable Interaction Design for Collaborative Visual Exploration of Big Data, Ioanis Leftheriotis, Ionian University, Greece Spatially Aware Tangible Display Interaction in a Tabletop Environment, Martin Spindler, University of Marburg, Germany Improving Awareness of Automated Actions within Digital Tabletops, Betty?Y. L. Chang, University of Waterloo, Canada Designing Tabletop Activities for Inquiry-Based Learning: Lessons from Phylogenetics, Neuroscience and Logistics, Bretrand Schneider, Stanford University The DS student works were also presented at the Poster Session during the main conference, which increased the visibility of the students and allowed them to get additional feedback from a wider audience across the ITS community. Most of the travel scholarship recipients funded by this grant presented work at the main conference and were encouraged to interact with the wider conference community. Travel recipients and student volunteers were posting in social media about the conference and the technical program – expanding the dialogue to community members who couldn’t attend the conference in person. Broader Impact This grant broadened participation in the field of Interactive Tabletop and Surfaces and more generally in computing at large by encouraging young scholars from diverse backgrounds to attend the conference, meet with more senior researchers, and pursue a career in this field. The grant supported a diverse set of students including members of under-represented groups in computer and information science and engineering such as women and members of US minority populations. The ITS 2012 DS provided a forum for young scholars from design, engineering and sciences to meet and share their work. The invited students reflected diversity across backgrounds, topics, educational institutions, and gender. During the ITS 2012 DS, students presented their work, and received constructive criticism from diverse viewpoints by a panel of faculty mentors. In addition to this, they also presented their work in posters at the main conference, and their short papers are included in the conference Proceedings and in the ACM Digital Library.
