WORKSHOP: ACM-Group'16 Doctoral Research Consortium

University Of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for approximately 10 promising graduate students along with a panel of 4 distinguished research faculty as mentors. The event will take place in conjunction with the 2016 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2016), to be held November 13-16 on Sanibel Island, Florida, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). For over 25 years, the bi-annual GROUP conferences have been a leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and practice on organizational behavior, information systems, social informatics, human-computer interaction (HCI), and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), providing a showcase for innovative work on the development, introduction, management, deployment, and analysis of computer-based collaborative systems. Research reports published in the GROUP conference proceedings are rigorously reviewed and widely cited. More information is available online at http://oldwww.acm.org/conferences/group/conferences/group16/. The GROUP conferences represent a critical link between the research communities supported by CISE/IIS and the broader social, behavioral, and management sciences. Maintaining and fostering research dialog among these diverse disciplines will result in synergistic and transformative research collaborations, and developing young researchers who can effectively bridge two or more of the broader CISE/IIS, social and management sciences is an important goal to ensure the future vitality of the IIS research community. In addition, there are both short and long-term benefits to the GROUP research community and to society from organizing this workshop. In the short term, the doctoral consortium will bring together the best of the next generation of researchers in organizational systems, information systems, social informatics, and CSCW, and provide significant scholarly critique and career advice for them. This will allow the students to create a social network both among themselves and with several senior researchers, and will facilitate their enculturation into the field. Furthermore, in this tight fiscal environment and job market, the workshop will also provide an avenue for advanced PhD students to advertise themselves and their work to conference attendees, many of whom may be hiring in the near future. Finally, the organizers will make every effort to ensure the recruitment of student participants who are diverse in terms of gender, under-represented minority status, and institutional affiliation; with respect to the latter, no more than two student participants will be accepted from any one institution, and if this is the case then at least one of them will be a woman. This diversity will help broaden the students' horizons at a critical stage in their professional development. In the long-term, students who have participated in the doctoral consortium will give back to the community by engaging as mentors themselves to future generations of students; the organizers expect these exceptional students to become the future leaders of the GROUP community. The GROUP 2016 Doctoral Consortium will begin with a full day pre-conference research-focused workshop on Sunday, November 13. The student participants will be later stage doctoral students from both the United States and abroad, and will represent a variety of disciplines including computer and information science, information systems, and communications. Workshop activities will alternate between formal sessions (large group and breakout groups) and informal sessions (meals and breaks). In the large group sessions, Consortium participants will explore themes of general concern, including how to conduct high impact research, how to select and use different research methods. Each student will present a summary of their work for public critique and lead discussion with currently open questions. This is expected to help students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other research, whether their 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. During informal sessions students will have an opportunity to interact one-on-one with faculty and fellow students, which is important for network development. The working lunch will focus on managing one's committee and learning how to "finish well." The working dinner will focus on career development plans, including best strategies for the job search in academe and industry. In addition to the day-long workshop, the program will also include events integrated throughout the conference such as student presentations at the posters/demos reception and a reflective wrap-up session. The goals of the workshop are to build a cohort group of young researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread across the world, to guide and shape the work of the new researchers by having experts serve as mentors and give advice, to provide encouragement and support for the selection of GROUP research topics, to make it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend a leading research conference and to illustrate for them the interrelationship and diversity of GROUP research, and in general to make the new entrants' experience at the GROUP conference enjoyable and rewarding, so that they will be encouraged to return and submit to future conferences in the series.