WORKSHOP: Graduate Consortium at the 2022 VL/HCC Conference

This is funding to support participation by 6 Ph.D. students from U.S. educational institutions, along with the PI and 2-3 other distinguished research faculty as mentors, in the Graduate Consortium (workshop) being organized in conjunction with the 2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). The conference, which is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing, will be held September 13-16 in Rome, Italy.

Established in 1984, the mission of VL/HCC is to support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and languages for programming, modeling, and communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by people. VL/HCC 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.

This year, the conference's emphasis is on Human-Centric AI; more information may be found online at https://conf.researchr.org/home/vlhcc-2022. The PI and the members of the organizing committee will make special efforts to attract a diverse and interdisciplinary group of student participants to the Graduate Consortium, with special attention paid to recruitment of students from underrepresented institutions and women.

To further increase diversity, no more than two student participants will be accepted from any given institution (and if two are accepted, then at least one of them must be from an under-represented group in STEM fields), and returning students will be given priority for approximately 1/3 of the slots.

Rapid advances in computing have led to continually deeper integration with human society, prime examples including online marketplaces, social media systems, massively multiplayer online games and open-source repositories. Yet as socio-technical systems have grown in complexity, they have become increasingly difficult for end users to completely understand and direct toward productive ends.

Therefore, a major goal of this year's VL/HCC Graduate Consortium, a full-day event that will immediately precede the conference on September 12 and be the 18th to be funded by NSF in this series, is to stimulate graduate students' thinking about how to exploit cutting-edge techniques from the earliest stages of problem solving. What methods, diagrams, and tools can people leverage to create mental models of complex socio-technical systems that can be used when making design decisions and for collaboration?

Effective approaches will bring users and software together in creative and productive ways that bear directly on the needs of modern society. The Graduate Consortium will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at alleviating a pressing problem of relevance to a great many people within our society. The student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop and will receive constructive feedback, both from the faculty mentors and the other students, that is geared to helping them 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.

This will promote discovery and learning, while also building community among young researchers working from the perspectives of diverse fields including computer science, the social sciences, and education. To get feedback from a broader slice of the VL/HCC community, every student participant will present a poster or demo at the Showpieces event during the main conference, and a 2-page extended abstract of each student participant's work will be published in the conference proceedings.

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.