WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at the IEEE FG 2017 Conference

University Of South Carolina At Columbia, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) of approximately 8 graduate students from U.S. educational institutions, along with unpaid senior members of the research community as mentors, to be held in conjunction with the twelfth IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2017), which will take place May 29-June 3, 2017, in Washington DC. The IEEE FG conferences are the premier international forum for research in image- and video-based face, gesture, and body movement recognition. Their broad scope includes new algorithms for computer vision, pattern recognition, and computer graphics, as well as machine learning techniques relevant to face, gesture and body motion for a variety of applications. The conferences present research that advances the state of the art in these and related areas, leading to new capabilities in interactive systems, biometrics, surveillance, healthcare, and entertainment, and they play an important role in shaping related scientific, academic, and educational programs. More information is available online at http://www.fg2017.org/. The Doctoral Consortium will provide an opportunity for Ph.D. students whose dissertations are on topics related to automatic face and gesture recognition to present their proposed research, and receive constructive feedback from an invited committee of faculty and industry researchers, as well as from other students working in these areas. The event will give students valuable exposure to outside perspectives of their work, and provide a comfortable forum in which to discuss and fine-tune their career objectives with members of the international research community, and identify areas that need further development. The workshop will also enable these young researchers to develop a network of contacts at a critical stage of their careers, and will foster a supportive community of scholars and spirit of collaborative research, which will have broad impact because graduate students who are conducting creative and groundbreaking work are the foundation and future of the community. The organizers will make a particular effort to recruit and include students from underrepresented groups (women and underrepresented minorities) and from smaller schools. The Doctoral Consortium will be a half-day event during the conference. There will be five distinct aspects to the event. Each student participant will be assigned a mentor based upon similarity of research interest and experience, who will discuss the work one-on-one with the student and provide constructive comments and guidance. There will be an oral session in which all participants present their research to the group. And there will also be a Doctoral Consortium poster session during the main conference, which will afford the students an opportunity to present their research to the rest of the community. Extended abstracts (up to 4 pages long) of the students' research will be published online on the FG 2017 website. Finally, students and mentors will all share a working lunch, in which mentors will briefly describe their career paths and student participants will ask the mentors questions about the different career paths. The combination of these five activities will provide an excellent and structured way for students to communicate with other students as well as with established members of their research community.