This is funding to support a doctoral consortium (workshop) of approximately 14 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning, along with 6 distinguished research faculty (4 of whom are women), to be held in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2013), which will take place May 29-31 on the island of Rhodes, Greece. The PETRA Conference mission is to promote interdisciplinary research that can improve the quality of life and empower people with greater capabilities using pervasive ambient intelligent environments. This 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. Innovations to be presented during this year's conference include intelligent human sensing, robotic devices to enable persons with disabilities, algorithms for data fusion, new computer aided rehabilitation methods, therapy game development that personalizes a game to an individual's needs, gesture recognition tools, medication management, remote secure communications and data sharing, remote health monitoring, and many other enabling technologies. More information about the conference may be found online at www.petrae.org.
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 20-minute 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 a "digital workbook" 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 2013 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, and in addition the PI plans to ask her dean for separate funds to support 2-3 exceptional undergraduates to participate in the conference.
PETRA 2013 is the sixth international conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments and will be one of a series of conferences. PETRA was launched in 2008 and it is the conference focusing 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. 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 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 dramatically improve the quality of life and result in new policies, enforcements, financial costs, copyrights, and ethical issues. Doctoral Consortium and Student Author Travel Award for the PETRA 2013 supported 14 student authors. PETRA student authors participated and presented their publications during the conference. During the conference, PETRA had several special sessions for PETRA scholars to describe their work, meet each other, exchange ideas on how to do interdisciplinary collaboration, discussed the benefits of the conference as well as issues related to their thesis progress. They received advice from professors and established researchers attending the meetings. The professors, researchers and PETRA scholars also discussed doctoral training and challenges in research. 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. In addition, 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: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2504335 ), gave the scholars opportunities for their work to become more visible. It also highlighted their respective advisors and departments in the US.
