WORKSHOP: Graduate Student Symposium at the 2022 ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support participation by students and faculty based in U.S. educational institutions in a Graduate Student Symposium (workshop) to be organized in conjunction with the 14th ACM Creativity & Cognition (C&C) conference, which will take place June 21-23 in Venice, Italy. Creativity is the cornerstone and the fundamental motive of both the aesthetic and engineering disciplines. It is a critical element of our economic and social prosperity, as a precursor to scientific discoveries, technological advances, and new forms of cultural and aesthetic experiences. Held every other year in an international location since 1993, C&C serves as a gathering place for the diverse communities of researchers, designers, engineers, and artists who provide an innovative and cross-disciplinary perspective on creativity and cognition as well as technological innovation. C&C is the only ACM-sponsored conference in which human creativity is the central focus, and as such it provides pathways for substantially different kinds of work including interactive art pieces, user studies of creativity support tools, and new sensor technologies for creative practice. It serves as a premier forum for presenting the world's best new research investigating computing's impact on and ability to promote creativity in all forms of human experience. The conference particularly values research that explores new, synergistic roles for computing and people in creative processes, or that addresses situations where computing, as contextualized in sociotechnical systems, may sometimes have an undesirable impact. The theme of this year's conference is "Creativity, Craft, and Design" and more information may be found online at http://cc.acm.org/2022/. The Graduate Student Symposium will have broad impact by contributing to the professional development of a more knowledgeable, capable, and productive workforce in the U.S., and by inviting participation of graduate students along with promising senior-level undergraduates from under-represented groups and at institutions not historically represented at the conference through aggressive and targeted recruitment. To further promote diversity, no more than two graduate students will be accepted from any one educational institution, and if there are two then at least one of them must be female. The Graduate Student Symposium will bring together up to 12 students (not all of whom will be eligible for funding) and 3 distinguished researchers from academia and industry as mentors, in a day-long event that will be held on June 20, 2022, the day before the main C&C conference. It will provide the students with a unique opportunity to present early-stage research and receive gentle feedback from mentors with different disciplinary backgrounds. The young researchers will gain experience and skills in communicating their own work and critiquing the work of their peers, as well as professional and social connections that transcend the event, and awareness of potential career paths in both academia and industry. The student submissions will appear in the C&C Proceedings, and they will be indexed in the ACM Digital Library. Students will also be invited to present their work at the main conference during the Poster Session, which will both give their work wider visibility in the community and provide an opportunity for them to talk one-on-one with peers and senior researchers, in addition to the focused mentoring in the GSS itself. 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.