ACM CHI 2009 Workshop: Human-Computer Interaction Doctoral Research Consortium

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support this year's HCI doctoral research consortium (workshop) of approximately 15 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with the ACM 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), which will be held April 4-9 in Boston, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). Goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. 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. Student participants will present their work to the doctoral consortium on April 4-5, with follow up activities planned during the technical program of the conference. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the CHI 2009 Extended Abstracts, which has wide print and electronic distribution. SIGCHI's conference management committee will evaluate the doctoral consortium, and the results will be made available to the organizers of future consortia. The CHI doctoral consortia, which began in 1986, have been highly successful in providing a forum for the initial socialization into the field of young doctoral scholars, and many of today's leading HCI researchers participated as students in earlier consortia. Broader Impacts: The annual CHI doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of HCI researchers, 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, including nationality/cultural and scientific discipline, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field. This year, in an effort to further broaden the impact of the event, the organizers have undertaken to use NSF funds to support participation by no more than one student from any one institution, and to also consider gender in the participant selection process with a target of a 50/50 split.