WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at HCOMP 2016

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) of approximately 12 promising doctoral students (at least 8 of whom will be from U.S. educational institutions) along with distinguished research faculty, to be held in conjunction with the HCOMP 2016 Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing, which will take place October 31-November 3 in Austin, Texas, and which is sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). HCOMP is a cross-disciplinary conference that combines human-centered methods and traditional computer science to address fundamental issues in human computation and crowdsourcing. It brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas such as human-computer interaction, psychology, economics, social computing, machine learning, information retrieval, databases and systems. More information about the conference is available online at http://www.humancomputation.com/2016/. The Doctoral Consortium will be a research-focused meeting that immediately precedes the conference, on October 30, and will enhance the scientific workforce in this emerging research area by developing a group of promising young researchers interested in human computation and crowdsourcing. The award will also enable these young researchers to attend the HCOMP 2016 conference, thus allowing them to interact with other researchers and conference events; to learn of potential career paths within academia and industry; to access an international network of researchers who can support their professional development; and to observe the interdisciplinary nature, diversity and interrelationships of research in human computation. The Doctoral Consortium Chairs will select about six additional distinguished researchers to serve as faculty mentors; this group also will serve as the review committee for student applications. Students will be selected based on a paper giving an overview of the student's dissertation research, an explanation of why the student wants to participate in the Doctoral Consortium, a CV, and a letter of support from the student's advisor. The organizers will give preference to students who are most in need of mentoring and joining a peer group. Moreover, the organizers will promote diversity among the selected students by selecting no more than two students from any one school, and by prioritizing the selection of women and underrepresented minorities. The full-day Doctoral Consortium will include activities to guide the research of these promising young researchers. The Consortium will allow participants to interact with established researchers and with other students, through presentations, question-answer sessions, panel discussions, and invited presentations. Each participant will give a short presentation on their research and will receive feedback from at least one faculty mentor and from fellow students. The feedback will be geared toward helping the student participants understand and articulate how their research is positioned relative to other work on human computation and crowdsourcing. The feedback will also address whether the students' topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are being appropriately analyzed and presented. Activities led by the faculty will include a panel discussion to give students more information about the process and lessons of research and life in academia and industry. To further integrate the Doctoral Consortium participants into the conference itself, students will have a chance to present their work as posters in an interactive poster session and their papers will be posted online on the workshop webpage. These activities will benefit the participants by offering each fresh perspectives and comments on their work from researchers outside their own institution, both from faculty and other students; providing a supportive setting for mutual feedback on participants' current research and guidance on future research directions; and enabling participants to form a cohort of new researchers.