WORKSHOP: Student Innovation Challenge at User Interface Software and Technology 2019

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Student Innovation Contest (workshop) to be held at the 2019 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2019). Cosponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) and the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), the UIST conferences are the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces. The conferences bring together people from diverse areas including graphical and web user interfaces, tangible and ubiquitous computing, virtual and augmented reality, multimedia, new input and output devices, and CSCW. Researchers and developers, from both academia and industry, meet to exchange ideas and present reports on new hardware and/or software advances related to these areas. UIST 2019 will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 20 -23. More information about this year's conference is available online at http://uist.acm.org/uist2019/. The Student Innovation Contest is intended to serve as a catalyst to increase participation of students and junior researchers from diverse backgrounds, due to its accessibility and strong visibility at the conference. This funding will supplement the existing program of the Student Innovation Contest, which is a collaboration between industry (supplying hardware and software) and academia (supplying the general framing and mentoring). The organizers want to increase the attractiveness of the conference for students and researchers from currently underrepresented socio-economic groups. To this end, these funds will be used to support travel and conference expenses of U.S.-based students from groups that would otherwise lack sufficient means to attend. The organizers will aim to include teams from diverse cultural and institutional backgrounds, with equal representation of genders. To further increase participant socio-economic diversity, the requested funds will allow the financial support of only one team per educational institution. The Student Innovation Contest will help shape future research projects aimed at technological advancement in HCI. The event will promote scholarship and networking among new researchers in this interdisciplinary area. The contest will give students and new researchers constructive feedback on their work, and will expose these promising young researchers to a larger international community. A key component of building this community is through its youth. The Student Innovation Contest brings students together from various backgrounds (e.g., engineering, computing, design, architecture) so that they can see the broader spectrum of research and development approaches. For the contest, students will receive specific hardware to develop innovative systems and showcase their work at UIST 2019 as demonstrations. The contest's objectives are to allow promising students and young researchers to showcase their work and technical skills at an internationally renowned conference through an evening-long event and gather feedback from experts in the field, to get access to a large network of researchers and practitioners in the field of HCI and build and expand their own network, to enable these junior researchers to attend the entirety of the UIST 2019 conference, and to support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and nontraditional career paths. The Student Innovation Contest will provide an opportunity for student participants to demonstrate their technical and creative skills to a large number of internationally renowned HCI experts, and to create a network of peers that includes both researchers and practitioners. The event will also offer participating teams the opportunity to attend the full conference and allow them to explore the diversity of the research that composes the UIST community. Evaluation of the Student Innovation Contest, and its organization, will be conducted, and the results of the evaluation will be made available to the organizers of future conferences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.