WORKSHOP: VL/HCC 2016 Graduate Consortium

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for approximately 10 graduate students primarily from universities in the United States (up to 2 may be from foreign institutions, in order to broaden the horizons of the U.S. attendees), along with a panel of 3-4 distinguished research faculty as mentors. The full-day event will take place on September 4, in conjunction with and immediately preceding the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), to be held September 5-8 in Cambridge, UK, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the Symposium. Established in 1984, VL/HCC's mission is to support the design, formalization, implementation and evaluation of computing systems that are easier for a broader group of people to learn, use, and understand. This includes research aimed at visual technology and text, and technology that uses sound, taste, virtual reality, and the Web. It also includes research on theories about the many media used toward this goal. VL/HCC occupies a unique niche among HCI and programming language conferences, in that it focuses specifically on how to help end users successfully develop and use software. More information about the Symposium may be found online at https://sites.google.com/site/vlhcc2016/. VL/HCC will be collocated this year with PPIG (Psychology of Programming Interest Group), which was established in 1987 in order to bring together people from diverse communities to explore common interests in the psychological aspects of programming and in the computational aspects of psychology. Students who attend the VL/HCC Graduate Consortium will also have the opportunity to attend PPIG talks and interact with PPIG participants. The PI and the members of the organizing committee will make special efforts to attract a diverse and interdisciplinary group of student participants, with special attention paid to recruitment of students from underrepresented institutions and women; to further increase diversity, no more than two student participants will be accepted from a given institution (and if two, then at least one of them must be from an under-represented group in STEM fields). Recent advances in computing have led to continually deeper integration between computers and human society. People now swim in a "sea" of socio-technical systems that synthesize large numbers of contributing users with vast amounts of source code. Examples include social media systems, open source repositories, online marketplaces and massively multiplayer online games. Yet as the socio-technical systems in this sea have grown in complexity, they have become increasingly difficult for end users to understand and direct toward productive ends. The primary goal of this year's VL/HCC Doctoral Consortium, the 14th to be funded by NSF in this series, is to stimulate graduate students' thinking about how to use tools and techniques in the early stages of problem solving such as problem definition and solution searching. In particular, what methods, models, diagrams, and tools can people leverage to create mental models of complex socio-technical systems that can be used to make design decisions and for collaboration? Effective approaches will bring users and software together in creative and productive ways that bear directly on the needs of modern society. The Doctoral Consortium will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at alleviating a pressing problem of relevance to a great many people within our society. This event will promote discovery and learning, by encouraging the student researchers to explore a difficult and challenging open problem, through involvement of a panel of well-known researchers whose task is to provide constructive feedback, and through inclusion of other conference participants who will also learn from and provide additional feedback to the students and to each other. The workshop will build community among young researchers working on different aspects of these problems from the perspectives of diverse fields including computer science, the social sciences, and education. It will guide the work of these new researchers by providing an opportunity for experts in the research field (as well as their peers) to give them advice, in that student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop and will receive feedback from a faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether the results are appropriately analyzed and presented. As in prior years, the VL/HCC 2016 Doctoral Consortium will be part of the regular conference program, and a 2-page extended abstract of each participant's work will be published in the conference proceedings.