This is funding to support a doctoral consortium (workshop) of approximately 13 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning along with distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2014), which will take place May 27-30 on the island of Rhodes, Greece. The PETRA mission is to promote interdisciplinary research on ways to use pervasive ambient intelligent environments to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance with greater capabilities; it is the only annual conference that brings together theoreticians and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines to focus on the application of pervasive technologies to assistive environments. Innovations to be presented at PETRA 2014 include smart tools for human sensing, devices to empower persons with disabilities, algorithms for data fusion, new computer aided rehabilitation methods, therapy game environments that can be personalized, gesture recognition tools, medication management, remote secure communications and data sharing, and remote health monitoring, among others. The PETRA proceedings are published by the ACM digital library, and the authors of the best papers are invited to submit to special journal issues after the end of the conference. More information about the conference may be found online at www.petrae.org.
The goals of the day-long Doctoral Consortium are to increase the exposure and visibility of the participants' work within the community, to help establish a sense of community among this next generation of researchers, and to help foster their research efforts by providing substantive feedback and guidance in a supportive and interactive environment from a group of senior researchers. Student participants will be drawn from diverse communities including computer science, engineering, psychology, social science, neuroscience, human-computer interaction, cognitive science and communication. They will make formal 20-minute presentations of their work and will receive feedback from a faculty panel; 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. The workshop faculty members will bring a wide spectrum of expertise, and provide student mentoring and coordination. Doctoral Consortium attendees will be asked to create and maintain a "digital workbook" where along with their work they include feedback on papers they attended and observations that they gathered (e.g., through meetings and discussions with conference speakers and other participants) that will apply to and impact their work. Short papers on the participants' work will be published in the conference proceedings, and a summary report on the event will be posted on the conference website.
Broader Impacts: The PETRA 2014 Doctoral Consortium will bring together some of the best students, researchers and practitioners in relevant fields, and will thereby afford the younger participants a unique opportunity to gain wider exposure for their innovative ideas while also receiving reinforcement for the importance and value of conducting research with societal impact. The workshop will allow the junior participants to create a social network both among themselves and with senior colleagues. The organizing committee will make a concerted effort to attract participants who are women, members of under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities. To further assure diversity, NSF funds will be used to support no more than 2 student participants from any one institution. And this year, for the first time, NSF funds will also be used to support attendance at the conference of 2 select undergraduate students, in the hope of exciting them about possible career choices in science.
PI: Fillia Makedon Awardee: University of Texas at Arlington Award Number: 1409897 Award Expires:11/30/2014 Program Officer Name: Ephraim P. Glinert Program Officer Email Address: eglinert@nsf.gov Program Officer Phone Number: (703)292-8930 PETRA 2014 was the seventh international conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments and one of a series of annual international conferences. PETRA is an annual interdisciplinary conference that was launched in 2008. It focuses on applying pervasive technologies to assistive environments and merging expertise and tools from many disciplines such as, imaging, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, user interface design, networks, high performance computing, rehabilitation, and other areas. PETRA has had a significant and broad social, economic and community impact. From the attendees of the initial conference that took place in 2008, a large percentage has continued to do research in human centered computing and has made contributions in their respective areas. The results presented at the Petra conferences impact not only at home environments but also work and public spaces. Application areas include healthcare, manufacturing, energy, conservation, safety, transportation and others. While many Petra results address situations in smart homes, rehabilitation processes, and nursing homes, they also address issues with persons and communities where assistive technologies can dramatically improve human performance and the quality of life. Petra research can also have an impact in non-technical areas such as social and ethical issues. The Doctoral Consortium and Student Author Travel Award for PETRA 2014 supported 15 student authors who presented their work during the conference. During the conference, we organized several sessions especially designed for the NSF scholars to allow them to describe their work, meet each other, exchange ideas and discuss challenges and opportunities in doing interdisciplinary research. We also addressed issues related to making good progress with the Ph.D. thesis and the students received valuable feedback and advice from faculty mentors who participated in these special sessions. Major findings of this project include: PETRA student scholars had the opportunity to present their work to a knowledgeable international audience of experts and interact with the assigned doctoral consortium faculty mentors, who provided them with useful comments and ideas on how to best continue and advance their Ph.D. research. The students had the opportunity to network with other graduate students from other universities and share ideas and approaches for a successful career in computing and applications. The students had one-on-one meetings with companies working on assistive technologies and with faculty who helped them develop career models and gain motivation from opportunities available after graduation. PETRA student scholars learned about how to improve their presentation style and build confidence from this experience. The students' scientific contributions to assistive technologies provided novel approaches to improving the quality of life and were publicized widely through the PETRA conference ACM Digital Library proceedings that also gave the students visibility. This funding highlighted the support of NSF towards young researchers and gave visibility to the departments and institutions in the US where the students came from.
