This is funding to support a Doctoral Colloquium (workshop) of about 18 dissertation stage doctoral students, in a variety of visualization subfields, for a day of discussions and interactions with 6 distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with this year's IEEE VIS meeting (formerly known as IEEE VisWeek), which will take place during the week of October 13-18, 2013, in Atlanta, Georgia. Visualization, or the use of interactive graphics to support data analysis and understanding, has become an integral part and critical component of many application areas. IEEE VIS is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry, now bringing together about 900 researchers and practitioners from around the world with a shared interest in techniques, tools, and technology. VIS consists this year of the 24th annual IEEE Scientific Visualization Conference (SciVis), the 19th annual IEEE Information Visualization Conference (InfoVis), and the 8th annual IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology Symposium (VAST). Co-located symposia this year include the IEEE Symposium on Large-Scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), the IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization (BioVis), and the International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VisSec). The papers published in the special conference issue of IEEE Transactions of Visualization and Computer Graphics are rigorously refereed and widely cited. More information is available online at www.ieeevis.org.
The Doctoral Colloquium at IEEE VIS is a research-focused meeting which has taken place annually at the visualization conferences since 2006, and has helped launch the careers of a number of outstanding young researchers. In 2013 the workshop will convene on Saturday, October 12, with follow-up events during the VIS technical program. A primary goal of the Doctoral Colloquium is to allow students to discuss their research directions in a supportive atmosphere with a panel of distinguished leaders and with their peers, who will provide helpful feedback and fresh perspectives. To this end each student will be assigned a specific mentor among the expert panelists and will be allotted approximately 30-40 minutes of time during the group sessions, to include a formal presentation about the student's doctoral research followed by in-depth discussions and feedback. The workshop will support community building by connecting beginning and advanced researchers (during events such as a common lunch for all DC participants, students and panelists alike, and a roundtable discussion at the end of the day where the focus will be on high-level topics beyond technical research), one of the objectives being to build a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues across the world. Student research will be disseminated via posters during the VIS technical program, and via publication in the VIS Extended Abstracts. Feedback about the Doctoral Colloquium will be provided to future conference committees.
Broader Impacts: The VIS Doctoral Colloquium brings together the best of the next generation of visualization researchers and allows them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers, which plays a major role in their enculturation into the profession. Since the students and faculty are a diverse group on several dimensions (nationality, scientific discipline, research specialization), the students' horizons are broadened at a critical stage in their professional development. The PI has affirmed that in managing this event the organizers, while striving to identify and include the broadest possible group of highly qualified participants, will also make an effort to encourage participation by women, racial/ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities. They will furthermore ensure that NSF funds are used chiefly to support participation by students enrolled in graduate programs in the United States.
This project requested support for a doctoral colloquium (DC) of promising PhD students and distinguished faculty held in conjunction with the 2013 IEEE VIS Conference (VIS 2013). Visualization is the use of interactive graphical representations of data to help cognition. VIS is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry, bringing together researchers and practitioners with an interest in techniques, tools, and technology for data analysis. VIS 2013 was held in Atlanta, Georgia at the Marriot Marquis Hotel during October 13-18, 2013. The DC itself took place on Saturday, October 12, and involved 18 student participants selected from a submission pool of 26, and 9 distinguished faculty from across the world. The goal of the VIS DC is to help newcomers to the visualization field build connections to other researchers and receive external feedback on their work. Given the distributed nature of the scientific community, performing visualization research can be a solitary and isolated endeavor for many young researchers. The VIS Doctoral Colloquium allows students to discuss their research directions in a supportive atmosphere with a panel of distinguished leaders beyond their doctoral advisor, as well as with their peers. More specifically, the objectives of the event are the following: Community - Build a cohort group of new researchers from across the world. Guidance - Guide the work of the new researchers by having senior experts in the research field coach them and give advice on future directions. Research Topics - Provide encouragement and support for selecting visualization research topics and research methods. After the Ph.D. - Give insight on future career paths, including job searches, interviewing, industry vs. academia, patents, grant writing, student advising, etc. Accessibility - Make attending the research conference more accessible to new entrants into the field so that they may become more integrated into the scientific community. Diversity - Illustrate the interrelationship and diversity of visualization research. Sustainability - Make the new entrants’ experience at VIS an enjoyable and rewarding experience, encouraging them to return and submit to the conference in future years. The intellectual merits of this project include the existing and future potential for the doctoral research performed by its participants. Since the students were selected chiefly on grounds of research excellence, this research represents the state-of-the-art in the field of visualization. The DC provided an opportunity both for these projects to be shaped and improved through intellectual exchange as well as for the students to present and communicate the character of their work to a key group of their peer professionals. In terms of the broader impact, the DC brought together the next generation of visualization researchers. This allowed them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers, which plays a major role in their enculturation into the profession. Since the students and faculty are a diverse group on several dimensions (nationality, scientific discipline, and research specialization), the students’ horizons were broadened at a critical stage in their professional development. The 2013 edition of the IEEE VIS doctoral colloquium involved 18 student participants and 9 invited faculty members. The students were carefully selected from an initial pool of 26 submissions using three reviews performed by the co-chairs of the event. The selection was based not only on research accomplishments, potential, and maturity, but also taking into account the overall balance of research area, nationality, gender, etc. During the closed, full-day event, student participants were given the opportunity to present their doctoral research in 20-minute talks, followed by a 20-minute feedback session (per student) from faculty panelists as well as other participants on the status, direction, and goals for their research. In addition to individual presentations, the event also included a common lunch for all participants that gave additional opportunities for one-on-one interactions between students and faculty participants, as well as a common roundtable discussion at the end of the day. The roundtable discussion was open to any general questions in relation to topics such as job searching, academia vs. industry, interviewing, grantsmanship, advising students, teaching, balancing work and life, etc. Interested participants were also invited to present their doctoral research as part of the general conference poster sessions.
