WORKSHOP: Doctoral consortium at the ASSETS 2022 conference

This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) of approximately 15 promising graduate students (up to 10 from the United States, who will be funded by this award), along with about 5 distinguished research faculty. The event will take place on October 22-23, immediately preceding and in conjunction with the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2022), to be held October 24-26, 2022, in Athens, Greece.

The ASSETS conferences are the premier forum for presenting innovative research on the design and use of both mainstream and specialized assistive technologies in support of the needs associated with speech, motor, hearing, and vision impairments, cognitive limitations, emotional and learning disabilities, aging and education in computing accessibility, as well as the professionals who work with these populations. Researchers and developers from around the world, in both academia and industry, will meet at ASSETS 2022 to exchange ideas and present their latest work.

More information about the conference may be found online at http://assets22.sigaccess.org/. A key component of building any community is through its youth. The Doctoral Consortium will help expand the participation of young researchers pursuing graduate studies in this field, by providing them an opportunity to gain wider exposure in the community for their innovative work and to obtain feedback and guidance from senior researchers and peers.

It will foster a sense of community among these young researchers by allowing them to create a social network at a critical stage in their professional development. 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.

To fulfill the Doctoral Consortium’s goal of providing an interdisciplinary atmosphere that will span the areas of diversity critical to ASSETS 2022, students will be selected to span a range of research interests and approaches. The organizers will take special steps to promote participation from institutions with relatively large numbers of students from underrepresented groups, and will not invite more than one or two students from the same educational institution; if two students from the same educational institution are selected, at least one will be from an underrepresented minority in STEM.

The ASSETS 2022 Doctoral Consortium will be a research-focused meeting of an international group of selected Ph.D. candidates under the guidance of the PI and a panel of distinguished research faculty. The event will be composed of two parts: an informal dinner for introductions and conversation (October 22), followed by a more formal all-day workshop which will include a mixture of student presentations, feedback, and small group discussions culminating in a second dinner (October 23).

Student participants will receive constructive feedback from the faculty panel regarding their presentations that is designed to help them understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to related 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. Thus, the Doctoral Consortium will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at assistive technologies and universal access; it will promote scholarship and networking among new researchers in these interdisciplinary fields, and will also expose the young researchers to a larger community.

Participants will showcase their work in a poster session during the conference, and to further integrate them into the research community a session has been set aside in the technical program where all of them can present their research to the full conference. In addition, the faculty panel will give a presentation on job opportunities for researchers both in academia and in industry, to better inform the students when considering career options.

An evaluation of the consortium will be carried out and the results made available to the organizers of future such events.

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.