Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2025 Doctoral Consortium - IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2025)

This award will support about 8 U.S.-based students to attend the Doctoral Consortium held as part of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2025). Face and gesture recognition are increasingly used to help people interact more seamlessly with computers, robots, and other agents that use recognition techniques to infer relevant aspects of people's mental states, goals, and intended actions.

The conference brings together interdisciplinary scholars from fields including computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interaction to develop new theories and methods around these topics. The doctoral consortium provides a valuable opportunity for early-career scholars to engage with international experts through structured oral and poster sessions, career panel discussions, and one-on-one mentoring.

This, in turn, will enhance participants’ technical expertise, promotes the exchange of ideas, and helps participants develop collaborations and professional networks that will serve their future careers as well as the community as a whole.

The Doctoral Consortium will be a half-day event during the conference. This year, there will be four distinct aspects to the event. First, each participant will be paired up with an invited faculty or industrial researcher who works in the related area and will act as their mentor both in the Doctoral Consortium and throughout the FG conference.

Second, there will be a career panel during a working lunch where participants will have an opportunity to discuss their research and career objectives with other participants and mentors in an informal setting. Third, there will be a dedicated oral session for the students to present their research to the invited committee. Fourth, there will be a poster session for the students to present their work to all conference attendees.

These four activities, taken together, will afford a structured way for students to communicate with other students as well as with established researchers of their research community. Students will be recruited from a wide range of institutions, disciplines, and backgrounds with the goal of growing the community of researchers. Selections will be based on fit to the conference topics and available mentors, students' career stage and financial need, and their ability to benefit from and contribute to the consortium.

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.