The 20th SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium

Association For The Advancement Of Artificial Intelligence, East Palo Alto CA

Investigators

Abstract

The AAAI Doctoral Consortium (DC) brings together established researchers and mid-career Ph.D. students for a two-day workshop where students and faculty interact in a range of settings to provide both formal and informal career and research mentoring. As a means of encouraging young and upcoming researchers in Artificial Intelligence, the AAAI Doctoral Consortium has been proven to be a relatively inexpensive and extremely effective model. Many of the current reviewers, mentors, and panelists were once student participants. The Intellectual Merit of the AAAI Doctoral Consortium lies in the unique opportunity for junior researchers to gain high quality feedback on academic and social issues relevant to their career, from senior researchers within their community. As part of the DC program, mentors and students interact in meetings, panels, working lunches, and during oral presentations and discussions. For many students, this is the only opportunity to receive focused input from researchers other than members of their dissertation committee. Students not only gain the experience of giving a talk on their thesis research and receiving specific feedback on their work, they also are given the opportunity to discuss more personal issues, such as balancing work and family. The Broader Impacts of the AAAI DC are centered on bringing together a wide range of students at different stages of research, from different types of labs and universities and different regions across the US and around the world, alongside an equally diverse group of mentors and panelists. By interacting with established members of the Artificial Intelligence community, students also gain a better perspective of the AI community as a whole. The 2015 AAAI DC plans to reach out directly to more students within the AAAI community?not only to the few who are accepted to present their work, but also to the many early graduate students and undergraduate students who attend AAAI, by inviting these students to attend the panels. In doing so, the impact of the DC will extend beyond the directly-support participants by encouraging other students to interact with mentors, and hopefully apply to the DC in future years.