This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for approximately 9 graduate students from U.S. universities, along with a panel of 3 distinguished research faculty as mentors. The event will take place in conjunction with and immediately preceding the 2014 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), to be held July 28-August 1 in Melbourne, Australia, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Symposium. Established in 1984, VL/HCC's mission is to support the design, formalization, implementation and evaluation of computing systems that are easier for a broader group of people to learn, use, and understand. This includes research aimed at visual technology and text, and technology that uses sound, taste, virtual reality, and the Web. It also includes research on theories about the many media used toward this goal. VL/HCC occupies a unique niche among HCI and programming language conferences, in that it focuses specifically on how to help end users successfully develop and use software. Recent advances in computing have led to continually deeper integration between computers and human society. People now swim in a "sea" of socio-technical systems that synthesize large numbers of contributing users with vast amounts of source code. Examples include social media systems, open source repositories, online marketplaces and massively multiplayer online games. Yet as the socio-technical systems in this sea have grown in complexity, they have become increasingly difficult for end users to understand and direct toward productive ends. More information about the VL/HCC Symposium may be found online at https://sites.google.com/site/vlhcc2014.
The primary goal of this year's VL/HCC Doctoral Consortium, the twelfth to be funded by NSF in this series, is to stimulate graduate students' thinking about how to make computation easier to express, manipulate, and understand. In particular, what methods, models and tools can people use to visualize, analyze, tailor, and direct socio-technical systems? The doctoral consortium aims to stimulate novel approaches that go far beyond simplistic solutions like Web browsers and search engines. Although search engines do provide information that is useful in simple situations, they represent only one portion of a socio-technical system (information retrieval); search engines alone are not powerful enough to be used to start new businesses and run them competitively, for example, since they only give people the ability to find resources provided by other people rather than the ability to create new resources. Effective approaches will bring users and software together in creative and productive ways that bear directly on the needs of modern society.
The workshop will build community among young researchers working on different aspects of these problems from the perspectives of diverse fields including computer science, the social sciences, and education. It will guide the work of these new researchers by providing an opportunity for experts in the research field (as well as their peers) to give them advice, in that student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop 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 human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether the results are appropriately analyzed and presented. As in prior years the VL/HCC 2014 Doctoral Consortium will be part of the regular conference program. A 2-page extended abstract of each participant's work will be published in the conference proceedings.
Broader Impacts: The workshop will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at alleviating a pressing problem of relevance to a great many people within our society. This event will promote discovery and learning, by encouraging the student researchers to explore a difficult and challenging open problem, through involvement of a panel of well-known researchers whose task is to provide constructive feedback, and through inclusion of other conference participants who will also learn from and provide additional feedback to the students and to each other. The PI and the members of the organizing committee will make special efforts to attract a diverse and interdisciplinary group of student participants, with special attention paid to recruitment of students from underrepresented institutions and women; to further increase diversity, no more than 2 student participants (one of whom must be female if two are accepted) will be accepted from any one institution.
Intellectual Merit: Today, computers play an important role in everyday life in both professional and personal settings. As computing continues to become more pervasive, more and more people are beginning to create and share the source code for computer programs. This kind of code sharing often occurs in social media communities, open-source repositories, online marketplaces, and massively multiplayer online games. However, despite the act of sharing code becoming increasingly commonplace, the underlying process of understanding, creating, and modifying source code has become more complex. This is especially true when a code-author must consider all of the new ways in which his or her source might be reused and reappropriated in future systems. The goal of this proposal was to advance knowledge and understanding of the issues and solutions in creating programming systems that are easier to learn, use, and understand by holding a Graduate Consortium (GC) at the 2014 IEEE Conference on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing. The GC brought together 8 US graduate students and 3 faculty members working in closely related research areas. Each graduate student presented his or her research work to the panel of faculty and their peers and received constructive feedback aimed at helping the student to move productively forward. Broader Impacts: The GC format was designed to support training and learning through its inclusion of both faculty and peer feedback. Past participants in GCs now hold tenure-track and tenured positions at a variety of institutions. The recruiting process targeted under-represented graduate students: three of our eight participants (37%) were women. Nationally, approximately 18% of graduate students in computer science are female. Of our seven survey respondents, 5 of 7 said the panel feedback was very helpful and 2 said it was helpful. From our open-ended questions, participants underscored the value of the panel feedback and peer interaction around discussing their research. Further, participants valued the opportunity to begin to form professional networks with others in a similar research area. Finally, respondents felt that the small setting created a more comfortable setting in which to give and receive constructive criticism.
