WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at the PETRA 2020 Conference

University Of Texas At Arlington, Arlington TX

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) of approximately 12 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning, along with at least 3 distinguished research faculty as mentors, to be held in conjunction with the Thirteenth International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2020), which will take place June 30-July 3 on the island of Corfu, Greece. The PETRA mission is to promote interdisciplinary research on ways to use pervasive ambient intelligent environments to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance with greater capabilities. It is the only annual conference that brings together theoreticians and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines to focus on the application of pervasive technologies to assistive environments. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in diverse application areas such as manufacturing, transportation, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, healthcare, biomedicine, environment and conservation. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, or persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cerebral Palsy and other disabilities or traumas. The PETRA proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library, and the authors of the best papers are invited to submit to special journal issues after the end of the conference. More information about the conference may be found online at http://www.petrae.org. The PETRA 2020 Doctoral Consortium will afford student authors of papers accepted for presentation at the conference a unique opportunity to gain additional exposure for their innovative ideas while also receiving reinforcement for the importance and value of conducting research with societal impact. The workshop will allow the junior participants to create a social network both among themselves and with senior colleagues. The organizing committee will make a concerted effort to attract participants who are women, members of under-represented minorities, and persons with disabilities; to further assure diversity, NSF funds will be used to support no more than 2 student participants from any one institution. To date, over 300 students based in U.S. educational institutions have been able to benefit from NSF support of the PETRA Doctoral Consortia. The goals of the Doctoral Consortium, which will consist of special sessions at the beginning, during, and at the end of the conference, are to increase the exposure and visibility of the participants' work within the community, to help establish a sense of community among this next generation of researchers, and to help foster their research efforts by providing substantive feedback and guidance in a supportive and interactive environment from a group of senior researchers. The special program organized for the students includes sessions between the doctoral students and the faculty mentors, in which the students will discuss their work and ask questions; the faculty mentors will provide constructive comments on the students' work and address their questions. Each student will be asked to submit a report that provides feedback about the conference, regarding the benefits they received, which presentations they liked and why, and how certain papers and topics relate to their work. After they finish these reports, students will participate in small group breakout sessions to discuss them, and the faculty mentors will provide guidance on how to proceed for further journal publication. Students will also have the option to submit a poster paper and to attend conference workshops on special topics. Short papers on the participants' work will be published in the conference proceedings, and a summary report on the event will be posted on the conference website. 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.