Workshop: Doctoral Symposium at the 2012 Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference (ITS 2012)

Wellesley College, Wellesley Hills MA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a doctoral research symposium (workshop) of approximately 12 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad (up to 2 international students), along with 4 high profile faculty and industrial researchers. The event will take place in conjunction with and immediately preceding the 7th Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces Conference (ITS ?12), to be held November 11-14, 2012, in Cambridge Mass., and which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery. The technological advances of the past decade have given rise to an increasing number of creative research areas that seek to overcome the long-standing separation between the physical and digital worlds. The ITS Conferences are a premiere venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies, bringing together about 200 top researchers, engineers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and human aspects of ITS technology; so topics of interest include not only innovations in ITS hardware and software but also expanding our understanding of design considerations for ITS technologies and their applications. More information about the conference may be found at http://its2012conf.org. The primary goal of the ITS Doctoral Symposium is to provide mentorship for future leaders in this growing field. To these ends the event is designed so as to encourage young scholars from diverse backgrounds encompassed by ITS to attend the conference, meet with more senior researchers, and pursue a career in this field. The day-long program will help establish a sense of community among the next generation of researchers, while increasing the exposure and visibility of the participants' work and at the same time fostering their research efforts by providing constructive feedback and guidance from senior researchers in a supportive and interactive environment. Student participants will each make a formal presentation of their work to the group, with ample time allotted for questions and feedback from the faculty panel as well as from the other student participants. 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. Additional opportunities for more informal discussion and networking will be during the doctoral symposium's lunch and dinner events. Students' short papers will appear in the ITS Proceedings and they will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. Students will also be invited to present their work at the main conference during the Poster Session; this will also afford the opportunity for students to talk one-on-one with peers and other more senior researchers, in addition to the focused mentoring of the Doctoral Symposium itself. Broader Impacts: Student participants will be selected on the basis of written submissions in the form of a six page ACM format paper submitted to the Doctoral Symposium chairs. These will be reviewed by the faculty panel and external reviewers. Participants will be expected to be pursuing a doctoral degree and will be selected primarily from the field of human-computer interaction, which could span a variety of disciplines including computer science, engineering, or a design background. The review and decision of acceptance will balance many factors including the quality of the proposals. The event organizers are committed to diversity across backgrounds, gender, topics, and institutions, as well as to the inclusion of students from underrepresented minorities. To assure broad coverage of topics and backgrounds, no more than two students will be accepted from any given institution and no more than one with any given advisor. NSF funds will be used primarily to support student participants from U.S. institutions, with no more than two educational institutions from abroad.