WORKSHOP: The Human-Computer Interaction Doctoral Research Consortium at ACM CHI 2016

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) of approximately 15 promising graduate students, along with a panel of about 3 distinguished research faculty mentors (this award will support 12 of the students and 2 of the research faculty) . The event will take place in conjunction with the ACM 2016 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016), which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI) and will be held May 7-12 in San Jose, California. The annual CHI conference is the leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice, and is attended by approximately 3,400 HCI professionals from around the world. Research reports published in the CHI Conference Proceedings and the CHI Extended Abstracts are heavily-refereed and widely cited; they are among the most scientifically respected and impactful research publications in the field of HCI. More information about the conference is available at https://chi2016.acm.org/wp/. The annual CHI doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of HCI researchers, allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Applications are encouraged from all doctoral students whose research is HCI-related, regardless of the fields in which they are earning their degrees. The event's organizers are committed to diversity. Due to timing issues, the student participants for 2016 have already been selected; there are 8 men and 7 women, and there is only one student from any given university. The Doctoral Consortium is a research-focused meeting that has taken place annually at the CHI conference since 1986, and has helped to launch the careers of many outstanding HCI researchers. Goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. During the two full days of the Consortium on May 7-8, each student participant will have a 45-minute time slot in which to make a formal presentation about his or her doctoral research and to receive feedback both from the faculty panel and the other student participants. The feedback is geared to help students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other HCI 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. Follow up activities including two poster sessions, are planned during the technical program of the conference on May 9-12. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the CHI 2016 Extended Abstracts. SIGCHI's conference management committee will evaluate the doctoral consortium, and the results will be made available to the organizers of future consortia. The CHI doctoral consortia have been highly successful in providing a forum for the initial socialization into the field of young doctoral scholars; many of today's leading HCI researchers participated as students in earlier consortia.