This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for approximately 12 graduate students, along with a panel of about 4 distinguished research faculty mentors. The event will take place in conjunction with the 2012 ACM Group Conference (GROUP 2012), to be held October 27-31, 2012, on Sanibel Island, Florida, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery?s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The bi-annual GROUP conference is a leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and practice on organizational behavior, information systems, social informatics, human-computer interaction (HCI), and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). It is attended by approximately 120 researchers and professionals from around the world; research reports published in the GROUP conference proceedings are competitively reviewed and widely cited.
The GROUP 2012 Doctoral Consortium (DC) will be a research-focused day-long meeting on Sunday, October 28, with follow-up events that take place during the conference's main technical program. Student participants will be later stage doctoral students from both the United States and abroad, who represent the various disciplines and subfields of interest to the conference. The goals of the workshop are to build a cohort group of young researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread across the world, to guide and shape the work of the new researchers by having experts serve as mentors and give advice, to provide encouragement and support for the selection of GROUP research topics, to make it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend a leading research conference and to illustrate for them the interrelationship and diversity of GROUP research, and in general to make the new entrants? experience at the GROUP conference enjoyable and rewarding, so that they will be encouraged to return and submit to future conferences in the series.
Broader Impacts: The GROUP conferences represent a critical link between the research communities supported by CISE/IIS and the broader social, behavioral, and management sciences. Maintaining and fostering research dialog among these diverse disciplines will result in synergistic and transformative research collaborations. Further, developing young researchers who can effectively bridge two or more of the broader CISE/IIS, social and management sciences is an important goal to ensure the future vitality of the IIS research community. The GROUP DC will bring together the best of the next generation of organizational systems, information systems, social informatics, and CSCW researchers. The social network among this next generation of researchers, and the relationships with senior researchers, created by the workshop will play a critical role in their enculturation into the profession. The organizers will be proactive in order to ensure that both students and faculty are a diverse group across multiple dimensions including nationality, scientific discipline, gender, institutional affiliation, and under-represented minority status.
The Group 2012 Doctoral Consortium (DC) was held in conjunction with the 2012 ACM Group Conference (Group 2012) at Sanibel Island, Florida, USA on October 28, 2012. The doctoral consortium was a research-focused meeting of a group of 9 selected Ph.D. candidates and a panel of 4 distinguished research faculty. The doctoral consortium was administered by two co-chairs, Aleksandra Sarcevic from Drexel University, USA and Dan Cosley from Cornell University, USA. The two additional panel members were Pernille Bjørn, from IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark and David Randall from the University of Siegen, Germany. We accepted a total of 9 participants (see image). Six of the 9 students were US-based; 1 was from Australia, and 2 were from Europe (1 from Denmark and 1 from Norway). Five of the students were male and 4 female; only one university was represented twice; and 3 of the 9 participants were the sole representatives of their institutions at the conference: Barbara Gligorijevic (Queensland University of Technology, Australia) presented her dissertation research titled "From Consumer to Community: Factors of Influence in the Purchasing Decision Making Process." Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi (Syracuse University, USA) presented his dissertation research titled "Social Technologies and Knowledge Sharing Within and Across Organizations." Rasmus Eskild Jensen (IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark) presented his dissertation research titled "Communication Breakdowns in Global Software Development Teams: Is Knowledge Creation the Answer?" Na Li (Penn State University, USA) presented her dissertation research titled "Language Proficiency Matters in Group Chat: Supporting Cross-Cultural Communication Processes." Jennifer Marlow (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) presented her dissertation research titled "Impression Formation in Online Collaborative Communities." Andrew Roback (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA) presented his dissertation research titled "A Framework and Future Direction for Studying Productive Applications of Social Media / Social Networking Sites." Rolf Steier (University of Oslo, Norway) presented his dissertation research titled "Learning Landscapes: Physical Space and Digital Technology in Museum Collaboration and Learning." Elizabeth Thiry (Penn State University, USA) presented her dissertation research titled "Scenario-Based Design of a Digital Reminiscing System for the Elderly." Jason Zietz (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) presented his dissertation research titled "Better Understanding of Human Decision Making Can Inform the Design of Sociotechnical Systems that Foster and Support Behavior Modification." Our selection process followed guidelines and criteria established at previous consortia: (1) that the majority of students should be from the USA, but that we should, within that constraint, seek to maximize international participation; (2) that we should seek to maximize diversity in respect of gender, affiliation, intellectual contribution and location; (3) that participants should be selected according to appropriateness of their research topics and their fit to Group; and (4) that participants should be selected according to potential for maximum benefit. We held a "welcome" dinner at a local restaurant on the evening before the consortium. Three faculty and seven students attended. This event was semi-structured and involved participants’ introductions and sharing of expectations for the upcoming consortium. The consortium itself was run as a single track event, ensuring that all students and faculty had exposure to both the written abstracts and presentations. Each participant was given up to 15 minutes to present his or her research with 15 minutes allocated for discussion. All faculty and students were invited to discuss each presentation. The event ended with a session dedicated to more general professionalization questions, including job search, portfolios, publishing, creating CVs, and seeking funding. In addition, all students were required to produce a poster for the poster session held at the conference on the Monday night. This year, for the first time, the conference poster session included the Best Poster Award, and the award went to Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi from Syracuse University, a doctoral consortium student participant. We are also excited to report that another consortium student participant, Na Li from The Pennsylvania State University, won the Best Paper Award for the conference paper based on her doctoral research. We asked participants at the end of the colloquium day about their opinions of, experiences with, and suggestions about improving the colloquium. Our methodology was qualitative, rather than quantitative, given the relatively small number of participants, and the comments fell into three main groups: (1) respondents were very positive about the process and appreciated feedback from both faculty and other student participants; (2) students appreciated the planning and preparation efforts prior to the consortium; and (3) the main suggestions for improvement involved making the program even more interactive. Students suggested that the talk-to-discussion ratio be even shorter, with 10 minute presentations and 20 minutes of discussion. Each participant’s two page abstracts have appeared in the ACM Digital Library. During the conference, all doctoral consortium students participated in the conference poster session, with opportunities to speak to conference attendees during the dedicated Posters reception.
