Workshop: 2021 CSCW Doctoral Consortium at the 2021 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

This is funding to support a doctoral research consortium (workshop) to take place in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery's 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), to be held virtually from October 23-27, 2021, and which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The CSCW conferences are the premier venue for the presentation of research relating to the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks.

The development and application of new technologies continues to enable new ways of working together and coordinating activities. While work is an important area of focus for the conference, technology is increasingly supporting a wide range of recreational and social activities. CSCW has also embraced an increasing range of devices, as we collaborate from different contexts and situations.

Research published at CSCW is heavily refereed and widely cited; the conference annually attracts over 700 top researchers from academia and industry around the world. The CSCW doctoral consortia, which began in 1992, have been highly successful in providing a forum for the initial socialization into the field of young doctoral scholars, and many of today's leading CSCW researchers participated as students in earlier consortia.

These doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of CSCW researchers, allowing them both to sharpen the research skills and to create a social network among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Maintaining and fostering research dialog among the diverse disciplines that are present in the CSCW community results in synergistic and transformative research collaborations.

Because the students and faculty constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, including nationality/cultural and scientific discipline, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field.

The Doctoral Consortium at CSCW 2021 will be a full-day event taking place the day before the main conference on October 24. Goals of the doctoral consortium include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field mentor them and provide constructive advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference.

Students will give brief presentations about their research, followed by discussion and constructive feedback both from members of the faculty panel and other student participants. The feedback will be geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other CSCW research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented.

Additionally, the mentors will discuss different aspects of research life, including career paths, funding, work-life balance, etc.

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.