This is funding to support a doctoral consortium (workshop) of approximately 10 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning along with 3 distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2010), which will take place June 23-25, 2010, on the island of Samos, Greece (www.petrae.org). PETRA is the leading annual interdisciplinary conference on assistive technologies. Its brings together experts in healthcare, sensors,, wireless communications, smart devices, intelligent software, privacy and security, to address an important social and healthcare issue, namely that as the world's population ages there is an urgent need to develop solutions for in-home care of the elderly, as well as of people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other disabilities or traumas. PETRA provides a unique venue that focuses on combining wireless computing, sensors, and other pervasive computing technologies into assistive environments. While PETRA 2010 will continue to bridge the continuum from data collection and processing to semantic understanding of human behavior, it will also evolve and incorporate new exciting aspects such as how to connect the genotype with phenotype, or the clinical/biomedical features with behavioral patterns and how these impact each other and thus refine research. PETRA 2010 will also study vital issues in privacy and security in monitoring ambient intelligent environments with the goal of identifying and predicting risks, intrusions, unauthorized access to information, or information leaking. PETRA projects assume a human is at the center of "cyberphysical systems" where the digital world merges with the physical.
The goals of the 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 in the Doctoral Consortium 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 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 have short papers on their work included in the Conference Proceedings, and a summary report on the event will be posted on the conference website.
Broader Impacts: The PETRA 2010 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. Since the conference is expected to host a diverse group along several dimensions (such as nationality, scientific discipline, and research specialization), participants' horizons will be broadened and new collaborations will emerge, to the future benefit of the field. The organizing committee will make a concerted effort to attract participants who are women, members of under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities.
PETRA 2010 was the third international conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments and taking place each year. The PETRA conference was launched in 2007, focusing on applying pervasive technologies to assistive environments and merging expertise from many disciplines such as, medical imaging, rehabilitation, remote sensing, sensor networks, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, user interface design, high performance computing, and nursing. PETRA has had a very significant impact in (a) advancing different subareas of computer science and computer engineering, (b) linking technological advancements with different health advancements, and (c) connecting technology and health developments with social, economic and community needs. This is demonstrated by the fact that conference attendees have continued to publish in interdisciplinary areas of human centered computing, graduating students and making advancements in their respective areas. In addition, the results which were presented at all Petra conferences and the 2010 in particular, have brought together US and foreign scientists to compare practices, exchange information on innovations involving assistive technologies for the home, workplace and public areas and promote future international collaborations. Effective design and application of assistive technologies not only address situations in pervasive environments, such as smart nursing spaces, but also transform the way healthcare is going to be applied. From socially assistive robots to sleep monitoring tools, PETRA outcomes can dramatically improve the quality of life and impact in health policy, decrease costs, and address different privacy, social and ethical issues. The Doctoral Consortium and Student Author Travel Award for the PETRA 2010 supported 10 student authors and the conference registration costs for 3 mentors. PETRA student authors had the opportunity to interact in an international setting with other scientists, participate in discussions and publish their work both in the conference ACM proceedings as well as in special journal issues. They presented their work, received received feedback and exchanged ideas on interdisciplinary research and on thesis progress. They received advice from established researchers attending the meetings and discussed research challenges involved in doctoral training. Major outcomes of this project are: 1. PETRA student scholars gained educational and research experience in presenting their work to an international audience, publishing in peer review conference and journals, and receiving valuable feedback to complete their Ph.D. research. 2. They had the opportunity to make valuable contacts with established researchers and other graduate students doing similar work, to develop career models and to become motivated by emerging areas and opportunities for future employment. 3. PETRA student scholars received mentoring and feedback on presentation skills to help build confidence. 4. The students' scientific contributions to assistive technologies were disseminated widely through conference proceedings (ACM Digital Library), gave the scholars opportunities for their work to become more visible. It also highlighted their respective advisors and departments in the US. Products from this funding: 1. ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) digital conference proceedings 2. Educational workshops focusing on specific areas of human centered computing 3. Demonstrations and insights that engaged both graduate and undergraduate students 4. A special session on assistive technologies and sustainability that led to the development of a new study abroad program at UTA, and a large NSF grant application that is pending. 5. The graduation of two doctoral fellows who received their PhD at UTA. 6. Extension of conference topics to cover specific chronic condition needs for assistive technologies which include, depression, cerebral palsy, dystonia, stroke, autism and Alzheimer’s.
