WORKSHOP: The Human-Computer Interaction Doctoral Research Consortium at ACM CHI 2017

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to partially support a Doctoral Research Consortium (workshop) of about 22 promising graduate students along with a panel of 6 distinguished research faculty mentors; the award will support 15 of the students (primarily those from U.S.-based educational institutions), and all of the research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with the ACM 2017 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI), which will be held May 6-11 in Denver, Colorado. The annual CHI conferences are the leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice, and they are attended by approximately 3,400 HCI professionals from around the world. Research reports published in the CHI Conference Proceedings and the CHI Extended Abstracts are heavily-refereed and widely cited; they are among the most scientifically respected and impactful research publications in the field of HCI. More information about this year's conference, whose theme is "Explore, Innovate, Inspire", is available online at https://chi2017.acm.org/. The annual CHI doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of HCI researchers, allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Applications are encouraged from all doctoral students whose research is HCI-related, regardless of the fields in which they are earning their degrees. To increase the broad impact of the event, the organizers are committed to diversity. Due to timing issues, the student participants for 2017 have already been selected; there are 8 men and 14 women who represent a wide range of topic areas and backgrounds, and there is only one student from any given university. The Doctoral Consortium is a research-focused meeting that has taken place annually at the CHI conference since 1986, and has helped to launch the careers of many outstanding HCI researchers. The 2017 Consortium will be a 2-day long event on May 6-7. Goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. This year's DC represents a nearly 50% increase in the size of the event; to accommodate that many student participants, the group will break into clusters of 3-4 students paired with one faculty panelist. Each student participant will have a time slot of approximately 20 minutes in which to make a formal presentation about his or her doctoral research and to receive feedback both from the faculty panelist and the other student participants. The feedback will be constructive and geared to help the students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other HCI research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Follow up activities, including two poster sessions, are planned during the technical program of the conference on May 8-11. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the CHI 2017 Extended Abstracts. SIGCHI's conference management committee will evaluate the doctoral research consortium, and the results will be made available to the organizers of future consortia.