Participant Support Costs for WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at HCOMP 2016

Overview: We request support for a consortium of promising doctoral students and distinguished research faculty to be held in conjunction with the HCOMP 2016 Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing, which is sponsored by AAAI. The HCOMP 2016 Program Chairs are Matt Lease (UT Austin) and Arpita Ghosh (Cornell University). The HCOMP 2016 Doctoral Consortium will be a research-focused meeting of a group of selected Ph.D. candidates, and a panel of distinguished research faculty. The Consortium allows participants to interact with established researchers and with other students, through presentations, Q&A sessions, panel discussions, and invited presentations. Each participant will give a short presentation on their research and will receive feedback from at least one faculty mentor and from fellow students. The Consortium also will include activities led by the faculty such as a panel discussion to give students more information about the process and lessons of research and life in academia and industry. Distinguished researchers in the field will join in evaluating the submission packets and will participate in the Doctoral Consortium, providing feedback to the presenters. The Doctoral Consortium Chairs, the PI (Northwestern University) and Edith Law (University of Waterloo), will select six additional distinguished researchers to serve as faculty mentors; this group also will serve as the review committee for student applications. This project will be managed by the PI with assistance from Edith Law and the HCOMP Program Chairs. Students, faculty, and conference attendees will be asked for feedback on the Consortium, including suggestions for improvements for future conferences. This feedback will be summarized in the final conference report submitted by the Conference Chairs and made available to future HCOMP Doctoral Consortia chairs. Student research will be disseminated via poster presentations during the HCOMP 2016 technical program. Student papers will be posted online on the workshop webpage but considered non-archival, thus may be freely submitted before or afterward to other archival venues. Intellectual Merit : The goals of the Consortium are to develop a group of promising young researchers interested in human computation and crowdsourcing though the full-day workshop event: guiding the research of these promising young researchers through contact with a select group of experts in the field; offering each participant fresh perspectives and comments on their work from researchers outside their own institution; providing a supportive setting for mutual feedback on participants’ current research and guidance on future research directions; and enabling them to form a cohort group of new researchers. By enabling these young researchers to attend the HCOMP 2016 conference, thereby allowing the student participants to contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events, thereby: allowing students to learn of potential career paths within academia and industry; giving them access to a network of researchers who can support their professional development; and illustrating the interdisciplinary nature, diversity, and interrelationships of research in human computation. Broader Impacts : All PhD students may apply to the Doctoral Consortium; however, priority will be given to students who have done their dissertation proposal and are within two years of finishing their thesis. Students will be selected based on a paper giving an overview of the student’s di