WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at the IEEE ACII 2015 Conference

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support travel for up to 10 students enrolled in PhD programs in U.S. institutions, to attend the 6th IEEE International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interactions (ACII 2015), to be held September 21-24 in Xi'an, China. Besides attending the main conference program, the students will participate in a Doctoral Consortium where they will share their research results with the community and receive feedback from senior researchers in the field. The ACII conference, which is held approximately every two years, is the premier international forum for interdisciplinary research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena. Its broad scope includes: multi-modal recognition or synthesis of human affect; psychological, cognitive, and neurological affect modeling; affective computing for social and behavioral sciences; and affective interactions for social robotics and virtual agents. The conference presents the latest research in these and related areas, and it plays an important role in shaping many scientific, academic, and educational programs. A theme of ACII 2015 will be to emphasize the biological underpinnings of affective computing, including how emotion is represented in the brain, how it prepares and shapes the body and even how certain genes can underlie affective dispositions. More information about the conference is available online at http://www.acii2015.org. By attending ACII 15 and taking part in the Doctoral Consortium, the students will not only learn the state of the art in affective computing research but will also have an opportunity to present their own work to, and receive feedback from, an invited committee of faculty and industry researchers along with other students working in related areas. Such an experience will greatly benefit the students professionally, by giving them valuable exposure to outside perspectives on their work and providing a setting in which to identify development needs and fine-tune their career objectives. Just as importantly, they will have a chance to meet established researchers and other graduate students doing similar work, to exchange ideas and to make contacts that will be invaluable to them as they progress in their scientific careers. Interacting with young researchers is also beneficial to experienced investigators, by providing fresh ideas and new perspectives. Thus, the Doctoral Consortium is a great confidence builder for the students involved, and highly stimulating to the senior researchers as well. To maximize the benefits of the NSF support, the event organizers will make a particular effort to recruit students from underrepresented groups (in particular, women and minorities) and from smaller schools or schools with less established affective computing research programs, as well as a demographically diverse set of mentors to advise these students (in terms of region, type of employment, and stage in career). In addition, no more than one student will be selected from any given educational institution. The specific goals of the doctoral consortium are: to provide a setting for face-to-face interaction and feedback on student participants' current research and constructive guidance on future directions; to promote networking among PhD students working in related area; to develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research; to support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths; and to support technical and culture interactions between American students and their counterparts from other countries. Each accepted student will receive up to $1,000 and will be asked to volunteer to help the ACII 2015 Chairs run the conference. Students who do not have a paper accepted for presentation either at ACII 2015 or one of its associated workshops will be asked to supply an extended abstract (up to 6 pages) describing their original, unpublished doctoral work, either completed or in progress. Each participant in the Doctoral Consortium will be assigned a mentor based upon similarity of research interests and experience, who will be committed to discussing the work with the student mentee in a one-on-one setting. There will be a Doctoral Consortium poster session, in which all participants will present their doctoral work or a recent paper that is part of their doctoral work. A best paper award will be given to honor Fiorella de Rosis, who co-chaired the first ACII Doctoral Consortium in Lisbon in 2007.