HCOMP 2015

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Call For Participation

Overview

The HCOMP 2015 Doctoral Consortium will provide doctoral students with a unique opportunity to meet each other and experienced researchers in the field. Students will be mentored by a group of faculty who are leaders in the diverse specialties that make up the HCOMP field. The objectives of the Doctoral Consortium are:

• To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their research with experienced researchers: the members of the Doctoral Consortium Program Committee.
• To provide students with an opportunity to establish a supportive community, including other doctoral students at a similar stage of their dissertation research.

Doctoral Consortium Co-Chairs

Brent Hecht (University of Minnesota)

Laura Dabbish (Carnegie Mellon University)

Program committee will include:

Jeff Bigham, Carnegie Mellon University

Lilly Irani, University of California at San Diego

Matthew Lease, University of Texas at Austin

Haoqi Zhang, Northwestern University

Date/Location

The Consortium will take place on November 8, 2015 in San Diego, CA, immediately before the main HCOMP 2015 conference.

Eligibility

Prospective: attendees should have written, or be close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent). We will give preference to students who have proposed or are about to propose but are far enough from completing their thesis that the feedback they receive at the event can impact their work. Before submitting, students should discuss this criterion with their advisor or supervisor. Those accepted are required to attend the event in person.

Selection Criteria: Selection will be based upon the expected potential of both the student and their proposed work, as well as the expected benefit to the student from participation. Priority will be given to students whose research goes beyond locally available expertise at their home institutions.

Required Materials: Applicants must submit: 1) a solely-authored overview of their doctoral research, and 2) a supplementary paragraph describing their motivation for attending and proposal status.

Doctoral Research Overview: You should submit a paper that describes your doctoral research. Your paper submission will be distributed to mentors and other attendees of the doctoral consortium. Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium will NOT be archived. As such, students may freely submit their research contributions for official publication in other venues. Abstracts will be publicized on the conference website.

Sections of the submitted paper should include:

• Motivation for the proposed research
• Background and related work (including key references)
• Description of proposed research, including key research questions and planned methodology to be used for investigating these research questions
• Proposed experiments if appropriate; Any preliminary evaluation and findings are welcomed, but this is not required.
• Specific research issues and/or challenges (don’t skip these; the consortium is about helping you solve issues!)

Format Requirements: Submitted papers must be written in English, formatted according to AAAI Format guidelines, and submitted as a single PDF file (embedding all required fonts). The paper should be no more than 3 pages in length including all figures and references, but not including the one page appendix. The first page must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details, an abstract of up to 250 words, and up to 3 keywords describing the research topic areas.

Supplementary Paragraph (Paper appendix). The paper should also include an appendix (placed after the references) containing a short paragraph written by the student explaining 1) why she/he wants to participate in the consortium at this point in their doctoral studies and how she/he expects to benefit from the consortium, 2) the student’s proposal status (writing proposal or recently proposed), and 3) expected defense date (approximately).

Submission Guidelines: Papers must be submitted via the CMT online submission system (https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/HCOMP2015/) to the "Doctoral Consortium" track. It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that their submissions use no unusual formatting and are printable on a standard printer. Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium Program Committee.

Schedule:

14 September 2015: Submissions due

22 September 2015: Acceptance notifications

8 November 2015: Doctoral Consortium

Miscellany: Students who attend the doctoral consortium will receive significant assistance in offsetting the expenses of the conference. More details will be available soon. Students who are accepted into the consortium will be required to make and present a poster at the main conference.