Twenty-First AAAI/SIGAI 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, organizers, and panelists were once student participants in prior AAAI DCs. 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 at their home institution. 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 when pursuing a research career after completion of their Ph.D. studies.