This travel grant supports US graduate students to attend the Doctoral Consortium to be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2013) to be held on April 22-26, 2013. Attendees include graduate students who are working on their dissertations and have been accepted to the consortium. Each student participant 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. Graduate students play critical roles in conducting innovative and groundbreaking research. 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 successful career of graduate students would be imperative to advance the state of the art in new algorithms and applications related to face, gesture, and body motion, leading to new capabilities in areas such as biometrics, interactive systems, surveillance, and healthcare.
The FG Doctoral Consortium funded by this project was part of the main conference program of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2013) held from April 22 to 26, 2013, in Shanghai, China. This project provided financial support for 10 U.S. Ph.D. students to attend FG 2013 and to participate in the FG 2013 Doctoral Consortium, on Tuesday, April 23, 2013. This consortium aimed to give the student participants valuable exposure to outside perspectives on their work, and provide them a unique opportunity to discuss and fine-tune their career objectives and to identify development needs with established scholars in their fields. The student participants were Ph.D. students who were working on their dissertations with topics related to automatic face and gesture recognition and had some results already published or close to be published. An effort was also made to include students from underrepresented groups, because these students would particularly benefit from receiving supportive and constructive feedback on their research plans, and from the opportunity to interact with their peers and senior researchers. In addition to the 10 U.S. students supported by this project, 10 Ph.D. students around the world participated in the consortium including 4 female students in total. Student participants were offered financial supports, which greatly helped them afford to attend FG 2013. A committee formed by faculty and industrial researchers coming from a diversity of research institutions was invited and volunteered to serve as mentors to advise the students during the conference. Each student was paired up with a primary mentor and a secondary mentor in the relevant areas. During a Doctoral Consortium Poster session, student participants presented their doctoral work to a broad audience including conference attendees and discussed his/her research with their mentors on a one-on-one basis. The discussion was continuing in a one-on-one lunch meeting between the mentor and the primary student mentee. During the lunch, the student discussed his/her career objectives with the mentor and obtained valuable feedback for his/her development needs. The consortium received very positive feedback from the participants. It fostered the career development of a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, industrial, and non-traditional career paths and helped to develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research. Equally important, it helped the young researchers to build their own connections. The successful career of the young researchers would be critical to advance the state of the art in face, gesture, and body movement recognition, which consequently pushes the frontier of related areas such as biometrics, interactive systems, surveillance, healthcare, and entertainment.
