Support to student travel for select students participating in the 19th Annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium. AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) is the major professional association for AI. This year it holds its yearly conference in Quebec City, Canada, where this DC will also take place. At the Doctoral Consortium (DC), PhD students who are pursuing work on AI-related topics present their proposed research and receive feedback from a panel of established researchers, as well as from other student participants. This provides the students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research and also enables them to explore their career objectives.
The DC program includes interactive sessions for feedback on dissertation topics from authorities in the field, collaboration-building sessions, early career advice, and well-placed networking opportunities. It is held this year in the venue of several important, co-located conferences: 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-14), the 5th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI-14), and the 36th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSCI-14). Participation in a doctoral mentoring opportunity such as this one raises the potential to bring in participants who might not have attended an AI conference out of lack of habit or resources. This is especially true for those at smaller institutions and those which have less developed AI programs. Engaging such participants has the potential to draw more talent into AI research, improve research ideas in their formative stage, and engender collaborations across the breadth of disciplines associated with intelligent systems.
