WORKSHOP: VL/HCC 2012 Doctoral Consortium

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) for approximately 11 graduate students, along with a panel of about 3 distinguished research faculty mentors. The event will take place in conjunction with the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2012), to be held September 30-October 4, 2012, in Innsbruck, Austria, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. The long-running VL/HCC series occupies a unique niche among HCI and Programming Language conferences, in that it focuses specifically on how to help end users successfully develop and use software. Recent advances in computing have led to continually deeper integration between computers and human society. People now swim in a 'sea' of socio-technical systems that synthesize large numbers of contributing users with vast amounts of source code. Examples include social media systems, open source repositories, online marketplaces and massively multiplayer online games. Yet as the socio-technical systems in this sea have grown in complexity, they have become increasingly difficult for end users to understand and direct toward productive ends.

The primary goal of this year's VL/HCC Doctoral Consortium, the tenth to be funded by NSF in this series, is to stimulate graduate students' and other researchers' thinking about how to make computation easier to express, manipulate, and understand. In particular, what methods, models and tools can people use to visualize, analyze, tailor, and direct socio-technical systems? The doctoral consortium aims to stimulate novel approaches that go far beyond simplistic solutions like web browsers and search engines. Although search engines do provide information that is useful in simple situations, they represent only one portion of a socio-technical system (information retrieval). For example, search engines alone are not powerful enough to be used to start new businesses and run them competitively, since they only give people the ability to find resources provided by other people, rather than the ability to create new resources. Effective approaches will bring users and software together in creative and productive ways that bear directly on the needs of modern society.

The workshop will build community among young researchers working on different aspects of these problems from the perspectives of diverse fields including computer science, the social sciences, and education. It will guide the work of these new researchers by providing an opportunity for experts in the research field (as well as their peers) to give them advice, in that student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop and will receive feedback from a faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether the results are appropriately analyzed and presented. As in prior years the VL/HCC 2012 Doctoral Consortium will be part of the regular conference program. A 2-page extended abstract of each participant's work will be published in the conference proceedings. More information about this year's VL/HCC conference may be found at http://vlhcc2012.di.unisa.it.

Broader Impacts: The workshop will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at alleviating a pressing problem of relevance to a great many people within our society. This event will promote discovery and learning, by encouraging the student researchers to explore a difficult and challenging open problem, through involvement of a panel of well-known researchers whose task is to provide constructive feedback, and through inclusion of other conference participants who will also learn from and provide additional feedback to the students and to each other. The PI and the members of the organizing committee will make special efforts to attract a diverse and interdisciplinary group of student participants, with special attention paid to recruitment of students from underrepresented institutions and women. The PI expects that most of the students supported by this award will come from U.S. universities (no more than 2 will be accepted from any one institution), but as in past years due to the highly international make-up of the research community a couple of non-U.S. students may be invited to participate as well.