WORKSHOP: ACM GROUP 2020 Doctoral Consortium

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

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 2020 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2020), to be held January 4-8 on Sanibel Island, Florida, and sponsored by ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (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 https://group.acm.org/conferences/group20/. The Doctoral Consortium focuses on participating students' doctoral dissertations and provides both an opportunity for these projects to be shaped through intellectual exchange as well as an opportunity to communicate the character of the work to a key group of early career researchers. There are both short- and long-term benefits to the GROUP research community and to society from this workshop. In the short term, the event will bring together the best of the next generation of researchers exploring the fields relevant to the conference, 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, the workshop will provide an avenue for advanced Ph.D. students to advertise themselves and their work to conference attendees, many of whom may be hiring. Finally, the students and faculty are anticipated to be a diverse group on several dimensions (e.g., scientific discipline, gender, institutional affiliation, underrepresented minority status), which will help broaden the students' horizons at a critical stage in their professional development. In the longer term, the organizers expect that students who have participated in the Doctoral Consortium will give back to the community by engaging as mentors themselves to future generations of students, and that these exceptional students will be the future leaders of the GROUP community. The GROUP 2020 Doctoral Consortium will begin with a full day pre-conference research-focused workshop on Sunday, January 5, followed by events integrated throughout the conference, including presentations at the posters/demos reception and a reflective wrap-up session. The student participants will be later stage doctoral candidates primarily from the United States, and will represent a variety of disciplines including computer and information science, information systems, and communications. Each student will present a summary of their work for public critique and will discuss currently open questions; this will help the 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. The working lunch will focus on managing one's committee and learning how to "finish well" while the working dinner will focus on career development plans, including best strategies for the job search in academe and industry. 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. 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.