Workshop: Universal Usability Doctoral Research Consortium; November 10-11, 2003; Vancouver, BC

Ibm Thomas J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights NY

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a doctoral research symposium (workshop) of approximately 10 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with the ACM 2003 Conference on Universal Usability (CUU 2003), to be held November 10-11 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Groups on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI) and Computers and the Physically Handicapped (SIGCAPH). Conceived a few years back by Ben Shneiderman, he CUU conference series represents an effort to build a new community of researchers that look at the broader, social issues of interface design. A key way to build this community is through its youth. The consortium's goal is to bring PhD students together from diverse backgrounds (computer science, biomedical engineering, human communication theory and economics), so that they can see the broader spectrum of research approaches to universal usability and also feel that there is a community for them in which they can pursue their research. The PIs recognize the pressures of conforming when students graduate and move into research disciplines defined by academic departments; they wish to counter these pressures by guiding the research of the attendees through contact with experts in the field, allowing these young researchers to attend the CUU 2003 conference, presenting potential career paths within academia and industry, and illustrating the interrelationship of different aspects of universal usability through interaction among students and faculty with diverse research interests. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the consortium, and will receive feedback from a faculty panel designed to help them understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to related 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 student participants will also present their work during the technical program of the CUU 2003 conference. Evaluation of the consortium will be conducted, and results of the evaluation will be available to the organizers of future consortia. Broader Impacts: The consortium will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at questions of universal access and universal usability, will promote scholarship and networking among new researchers in this emerging interdisciplinary area, and will give new these promising young researchers constructive feedback on their work and expose them to a larger community.