This is funding to support a Doctoral Colloquium (workshop) of about 12 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 VisWeek meeting, which will take place during the week of October 23-28, 2011, in Providence, RI. 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 VisWeek 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. VisWeek consists this year of five main events: IEEE Visualization (Vis), IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis), the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology Symposium (VAST), the IEEE Symposium on Large-Scale Data Analysis and Visualization, and the IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization. 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.visweek.org.
The Doctoral Colloquium at IEEE VisWeek is a research-focused meeting which has taken place annually at the Visualization conference since 2006, and has helped launch the careers of a number of outstanding young researchers. In 2011 the workshop will convene on Sunday, October 23, with follow-up events during the VisWeek 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. The workshop supports community building, by connecting beginning and advanced researchers, 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 VisWeek technical program, and via publication in the VisWeek Extended Abstracts. Feedback about the Doctoral Colloquium will be provided to future conference committees.
Broader Impacts: The VisWeek 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 he and his colleagues will try explicitly to identify and include the broadest possible group of highly qualified participants, that they will make an effort to encourage the participation of women, racial/ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, and they will ensure that NSF funds are used chiefly to support participation by students enrolled in graduate programs in the United States.
It can be difficult for doctoral students to establish their work in the community, and to get meaningful feedback from people in the field. The Doctoral Colloquium at the VisWeek conference provides the opportunity for twelve students to spend one day discussing their work with peers and mentors in a friendly and constuctive environment. The colloquium chairs received 24 applications in 2011, of which we accepted 12 (50%). The criteria for selection were mainly based on the students' stage in their doctoral work, which should be close to the proposal (students later cannot easily change direction, and when they are too early in their program they will not have enough work to discuss). We also tried to ensure a good representation of different kinds of research, though that was a secondary concern. Before the colloquium, each participant was assigned two mentors, who read his or her submission and prepared their comments. During the day, each participant gave a brief (15-minute) presentation, which was followed by a discussion. This was led by the assigned mentors, but other mentors and fellow students were of course welcome to participate (and did). One session also consistet of a panel discussion between mentors to talk about research issues, life as a doctoral student, their own experiences, etc. This resulted in a lively discussion that provided useful hints to the students how to deal with the little problems they are facing that are not directly related to their research. Funding from NSF made it possible for these students to attend the VisWeek conference (by covering the registration fee and providing a travel stipend), and also provided lunch for the day so that the students could mingle and keep talking rather than dispersing to find food. Many of the participants have since finished their degrees and gone on to post-doc, researcher, or faculty positions.
