WORKSHOP: Graduate Student Symposium at the 2017 ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support participation by students and faculty based in U.S. educational institutions in a Graduate Student Symposium (workshop) to be organized in conjunction with the 2017 ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C) conference, which will take place June 27-30 in Singapore. Creativity is the cornerstone and the fundamental motive of both the aesthetic and engineering disciplines. It is a critical element of our economic and social prosperity, as a precursor to scientific discoveries and technological advances. Held every other year in an international location since 1993, C&C serves as a gathering place for the diverse communities of researchers, designers, engineers, and artists who provide an innovative and cross-disciplinary perspective on creativity and cognition as well as technological innovation. C&C is the only ACM-sponsored conference in which human creativity is the central focus, and as such it provides pathways for substantially different kinds of work including user studies of creativity support tools and new sensor technologies for creative practice. It serves as a premier forum for presenting the world's best new research investigating computing's impact on and ability to promote creativity in all forms of human experience. The conference particularly values research that explores new, synergistic roles for computing and people in creative processes, or that addresses situations where computing, as contextualized in sociotechnical systems, may sometimes have an undesirable impact. More information about the 11th conference, the first to be held in Asia, may be found online at http://cc.acm.org/2017/. The GSS will bring together up to 12 promising doctoral students (not all of whom who be eligible for funding) and 4 distinguished researchers from academia and industry as mentors, in a day-long event that will be held on June 26, 2017, the day before the main C&C conference. The student submissions will appear in the C&C Proceedings, and they will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. The students will also be invited to present their work at the main conference during the poster session, which will give their work wider visibility in the community while also affording an opportunity for them to talk one-on-one with peers and other senior researchers. To promote diversity, no more than two graduate students will be accepted from any one institution, and if there are two then at least one of them must be female. Thus, the symposium will guide early stage research and creative explorations to advance knowledge and practice in the field of creativity and cognition, and contribute to the professional development of a more knowledgeable, capable, and productive workforce in the United States. The GSS will provide graduate students with a unique opportunity to present early stage research and receive feedback from mentors with different disciplinary backgrounds. They will gain experience and skills in communicating their own work and critiquing the work of peers. They will come away with new research insights and possible directions, with better understanding of prior work and of the field overall, and with new awareness of potentially useful methods that draw from different disciplines. And they will have the opportunity to build professional and social connections that transcend the event, and to gain awareness of potential career paths in both academia and industry. During the morning, each student will briefly present his or her work in a short formal talk. Mentors will lead a brief discussion of the work, including the research question, method of addressing the question, possible results and findings, significance of the work, and pointers to related work and research areas. The mentors will also offer a critique of each student's written and oral presentation. These discussions will continue through a working lunch. In the afternoon the mentors will lead a broad discussion that relates the presentations to one another and to the other work in the field. They will attempt to highlight common themes that emerged across the individual student works, and note differences and similarities in research methods both across individual research projects as well as across diverse intellectual threads within the creativity and cognition field as a whole. In the last portion of the day, the mentors will lead a discussion on pursuing a career in this interdisciplinary field and what the opportunities are from different disciplinary perspectives.