WORKSHOP: Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'06) Doctoral Consortium; September 4-8, 2006; Brighton, United Kingdom

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a doctoral consortium for 10-14 promising graduate students from the United States, along with distinguished research faculty, and up to 5 non-U.S. students (who will be invited to participate without financial support), which will take place in conjunction with the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'06), to be held September 4-8 in Brighton, UK, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. Our society has evolved into two distinct classes: the information haves and have-nots. Research in human-computer interaction and related disciplines has demonstrated the usefulness of multiple modes of access in augmenting human-to-computer and human-to-human interaction and their applicability to a diversified range of communities. But the rapid development of mobile computing and hand-held device technologies raises a number of challenging issues in effective and efficient access methods and techniques across a variety of devices, people, and capabilities, which continue to outpace efforts to find solutions. Thus, the focus of this year's VL/HCC doctoral consortium, the fourth to be funded by NSF in this series, is once again on how designers of digital devices and environments can better address universal access issues through multiple modes of interaction. Participants will explore multimodal and multimedia interaction between human and computer, between human and human with the help and mediation of the computer, and between people and the Web. The goal is to stimulate thinking on issues such as: how the modality/media of a tool or device may affect users' willingness and ability to access, manipulate, and program; what are the special needs of disadvantaged populations; and how devices/environments might be designed to better meet these needs. The workshop will bring together and 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 the 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 their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the conference proceedings, which has wide print and electronic distribution. The conference steering committee will evaluate the workshop outcome, and the results will be made available to the organizers of possible similar future events. 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.