This is funding to support a doctoral consortium (workshop) of approximately 12 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning along with 9 distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with the Fifth International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2012), which will take place June 6-8 on the island of Crete, Greece (www.petrae.org). PETRA is the only annual conference that brings together theoreticians and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines to focus on the application of pervasive technologies to assistive environments. What connects different disciplines in this highly interdisciplinary but topical conference is the ability to discover new alliances, share data and design new methods that have real-world social impact while also advancing each field scientifically. PETRA projects assume a human is at the center of "cyberphysical systems" where the digital world merges with the physical. PETRA 2012 will address timely computational challenges including integration mechanisms of diverse sensor technologies, modeling heterogeneous data, synthesis and analysis of data streams, privacy and security of information, ranking, cleaning, storing and retrieving sensor data streams for pattern analysis and discovery, robust remote rehabilitation mechanisms, correlating brain imaging with behavioral imaging, handling intensive real time data in complex environments, and ways to interpret seemingly meaningless data in order to derive meaningful human behavioral patterns and/or to identify important "events" or changes. PETRA 2012 will also incorporate new exciting aspects in improving the quality of human life and health, such as how clinical and biomedical indicators are connected with observed behavioral patterns over time to refine a particular treatment.
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 be asked to create and maintain "conference workbook" (webpage) where along with their work they include feedback on papers they attended and observations that they gathered (e.g., through meetings and discussions with conference speakers and other participants) that will apply to and impact their work. Short papers on the participants' work will be published in the Conference Proceedings (which are included in the ACM Digital Library), and a summary report on the event will be posted on the conference website.
Broader Impacts: The PETRA 2012 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. The organizing committee will make a concerted effort to attract participants who are women, members of under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities. To further assure participant diversity, the organizers will endeavor not to accept more than 2 students from any one institution.
PETRA 2012 was the Fifth International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, an annual conference. PETRA was launched in 2008. It focuses on applying pervasive technologies to assistive environments and merging expertise from other disciplines such as, imaging, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, user interface design, networks, high performance computing, and others. The PETRA community has expanded since the first occurrence to include other areas, such as tools for psychotherapy. PETRA has had a significant and broad social, economic and community impact. From the attendees of the initial conference that took place in 2008, a large percentage has continued to do research in human centered computing and made contributions in their respective areas. The results presented at the Petra conferences impact not only at-home environments but also work environments and public spaces. While many Petra results address situations in smart homes, rehabilitation processes, and nursing homes, they also address issues with persons and communities where assistive technologies can improve the workplace, manufacturing environments and policy making at the state and federal levels. The Doctoral Consortium and Student Author Travel Award for PETRA 2012 supported 12 student authors who presented their publications during the conference and interacted with mentoring faculty and other students during special sessions. The NSF PETRA scholars used these sessions to discuss their work, problems they faced, and express feedback based on the conference topics. During the sessions, the students received advice from professors and discussed doctoral research challenges. Major findings of this project include: 1. PETRA student scholars had the opportunity to present their work to a knowledgeable audience and interact with the assigned faculty mentors, provided them with useful comments that offered new insights on best ways to continue and complete their Ph.D. research. 2. PETRA student scholars had the opportunity to meet established researchers and other graduate students doing similar work, to exchange ideas and make new contacts. This helped them develop career models and become further motivated about the opportunities available after graduation. It also helped them create new contacts for future employment. 3. PETRA student scholars learned about how to improve their presentation style and build confidence from this experience. 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. Conference proceedings: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2413097&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=343333405&CFTOKEN=29794006 2. The Petra 2012 produced ideas on how to attract and engage undergraduates in the future and as a result, several REU students were supported. 3. Ideas and discussions from PETRA2012 led two new health informatics courses at UTA and a new tutorial session to PETRA2013. 4. Two PhD students who were NSF scholars will received their PhD at UTA in 2013
