This is funding to support participation by 2 graduate students from U.S. institutions in a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) that was held in conjunction with the 2013 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2013), which took place October 1-4 in Adelaide, Australia, and which was organized by the IEEE Computer Society with academic sponsorship from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). For over a decade, ISMAR (and its forerunner events IWAR/ISAR and ISMR) has been the premier international conference on research into the science, technology, applications and uses of Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR). The proliferation of powerful mobile hardware has opened up new avenues of research into MR and AR while enabling corporate and consumer applications on a wide scale. Across this spectrum fascinating new types of user interfaces, technologies, and concepts are beginning to emerge. The field is highly interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together technologists, educators, humanists, artists and social scientists, among others. ISMAR is one of the largest meetings devoted to the advancement of mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction with the physical world, and encourages six different submission types: Papers and Posters, Workshops, Panels, Tutorials, Demonstrations and Contests. Because of the diverse fields relevant to mixed and augmented reality, ISMAR content is organized in two tracks: The Science & Technology (S&T) program and The Arts, Media and Humanities (AMH) program. The top papers are often extended, reviewed, and submitted for publication in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. More information about the conference may be found at http://ismar.vgtc.org/.
This was the second Doctoral Consortium held in conjunction with an ISMAR symposium. A total of 7 graduate students participated in the workshop, along with senior members of the community (faculty and industry researchers) who served as mentors. The goal was to provide the students with an opportunity at a critical time in their careers to present their work to a group of mentors and peers from a diverse set of academic and industrial institutions, to receive feedback on their doctoral research plan and progress, and to build a cohort of young researchers within the ISMAR community. To these ends participants were asked to prepare both a technical presentation and a poster describing their work. A pre-event social dinner allowed the attendees (students, mentors and organizers) to get to know each other. The following day all attendees met for an informal breakfast at 8:00 AM, after which each student participant had 50 minutes devoted to his/her research, beginning with a presentation for approximately 30 minutes followed by about 20 minutes reserved for an extensive discussion with the other graduate student participants and the senior researchers. The discussion was facilitated by the Doctoral Consortium co-chairs and mentors, with the goal of addressing the strengths and weaknesses of the research, challenges and issues, implications of the results, potential suggestions for additional approaches or follow-on work, and career guidance related to the student's work and area. The posters were on display during the ISMAR conference poster sessions (in which the students were expected to take part), and were marked as being part of the Doctoral Consortium. All results from the Doctoral Consortium, including the procedures followed, were archived in the ISMAR 2013 DC binder as a reference for next year's conference.
Broader Impacts: The organizers took steps proactively to achieve a diversity of research topics, disciplinary backgrounds, methodological approaches, and home institutions among the students, to ensure that they met people outside their own specific area. For example, a maximum of one graduate student per institution was selected. Factors such as gender and ethnicity were also taken into account, with an emphasis on including underrepresented groups. Due in part to the remote location of this year's conference, in the end most of the student participants were from foreign universities; funding for the international students was secured from other sources, with NSF funds being requested only to support the 2 students from U.S. institutions of higher learning.
