Doctoral Consortium and Student - Author Travel for PETRA '10 Conference

University Of Texas At Arlington, Arlington TX

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a doctoral consortium (workshop) of approximately 10 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning along with 3 distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2010), which will take place June 23-25, 2010, on the island of Samos, Greece (http://www.petrae.org). PETRA is the leading annual interdisciplinary conference on assistive technologies. Its brings together experts in healthcare, sensors,, wireless communications, smart devices, intelligent software, privacy and security, to address an important social and healthcare issue, namely that as the world's population ages there is an urgent need to develop solutions for in-home care of the elderly, as well as of people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other disabilities or traumas. PETRA provides a unique venue that focuses on combining wireless computing, sensors, and other pervasive computing technologies into assistive environments. While PETRA 2010 will continue to bridge the continuum from data collection and processing to semantic understanding of human behavior, it will also evolve and incorporate new exciting aspects such as how to connect the genotype with phenotype, or the clinical/biomedical features with behavioral patterns and how these impact each other and thus refine research. PETRA 2010 will also study vital issues in privacy and security in monitoring ambient intelligent environments with the goal of identifying and predicting risks, intrusions, unauthorized access to information, or information leaking. PETRA projects assume a human is at the center of "cyberphysical systems" where the digital world merges with the physical. 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 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 have short papers on their work included in the Conference Proceedings, and a summary report on the event will be posted on the conference website. Broader Impacts: The PETRA 2010 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. Since the conference is expected to host a diverse group along several dimensions (such as nationality, scientific discipline, and research specialization), participants' horizons will be broadened and new collaborations will emerge, to the future benefit of the field. The organizing committee will make a concerted effort to attract participants who are women, members of under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities.