This is funding to support a doctoral research symposium (workshop) of approximately 8 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad (no more than one, to broaden the horizons of the U.S. participants), along with about 4 distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with and immediately preceding the 25th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2012), to be held October 6-10 in Cambridge, MA, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The annual UIST conference is the premier international forum for presenting innovative research results as well as implementation experiences in the software and technology of human computer interaction. It brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas that include traditional graphical and web user interfaces, tangible and ubiquitous computing, virtual and augmented reality, multimedia, new input and output devices, and computer-supported cooperative work. More information about the conference may be found at www.acm.org/uist.
This year's doctoral research symposium will be just the 10th such workshop associated with the UIST conferences (NSF has offered support for these events from their inception). The three goals of this full-day event 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 from a group of senior researchers in a supportive and interactive environment. To these ends, student participants will each make formal 20-minute presentations of their work to the group, to be followed by an extensive discussion lasting approximately 30 minutes during which they 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 students will also present their research to a wider audience through posters at the conference poster reception, brief overviews during the conference overview session, and short papers in the UIST Adjunct Proceedings.
Broader Impacts: The doctoral symposium will help expand the participation of young researchers pursuing graduate studies in the vital field of user interface software and technology, by providing them an opportunity to gain wider exposure in the community for their innovative work and to obtain feedback and guidance from senior members of the research community. It will also foster a sense of community among these young researchers, by allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Because the students and faculty constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field. The organizers of the event will make special efforts to attract students from institutions not historically heavily represented at UIST and to foster diversity across under-represented groups. To further increase participant diversity, the organizers will use NSF funds to support no more than one student from any single institution.
This project supported the Doctoral Symposium at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). The Doctoral Symposium helps expand the participation of young researchers currently pursuing Ph.D. studies in the vital field of user interface software and technology. This gives their innovative work wider exposure in the community, helps to foster a sense of community among these young researchers, and provides an opportunity for them to obtain feedback and guidance from senior members of the research community in an interactive and supportive environment. The ACM UIST 2012 Doctoral Symposium took place October 6–7, 2012, and the ACM UIST 2013 Doctoral Symposium took place October 7–8, 2013. Each included an informal social event to establish a supportive atmosphere for subsequent interaction, an intensive day-long series of student paper presentations and faculty-guided discussion, and continued interaction among participants throughout the ACM UIST conference itself. The 16 Ph.D. students who participated in 2012 and 2013 each prepared a paper of up to four pages in length on their research, all of which were published in the Adjunct Proceedings of ACM UIST 2012 and 2013. The student research that was presented at the ACM UIST Doctoral Symposium directly addressed a number of other disciplines in which this research is likely to have a future impact. Topics covered included providing nonvisual access to the web for users with visual impairments, making possible rapid design of websites for businesses at large, supporting hospital caregivers during medical crises, assisting document creation and editing in any discipline, improving accessibility of touch-screen devices for people with low levels of vision and motor ability, developing and delivering interactive instructions for mechanical assembly tasks, creating richer input facilities for mobile devices used alone and with other devices, understanding better how websites are actually used, determining how people interact across a broad range of devices, and making it possible for nonprogramming users to modify existing user interfaces. Given the highly interdisciplinary nature of the Ph.D. student research presented at the ACM UIST Doctoral Symposium, it is likely that some of this work (and some of the students themselves, after graduation) will transfer to government and industry.
