WORKSHOP: Doctoral Consortium at ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2014

This is funding to support participation by 3 PhD students based in US educational institutions in the Student Consortium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the 2014 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2014), which will take place in Vancouver, Canada, on June 21-25. The annual DIS conferences represent the growing interest in next-generation interactive user interfaces. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, they bring together 200-300 researchers and corporate leaders from North America, Europe, and Asia to present and discuss the latest multidisciplinary work on the design and evaluation of user interfaces, systems, and applications. At this year's conference approximately 100 papers will be presented, all of which will be published in the DIS Conference Proceedings and also in ACM's Digital Library. The program will also include invited keynote talks, system demonstrations, poster sessions, and a variety of workshops.

Topics of particular interest to the conference span a broad range, including: methods, tools, and techniques for engaging people; researching, designing, and co-designing interactive systems; the use of critical and cultural theory to understand, critique, and reflect on design products and contexts as well as design practices; user experience; usability; engagement; empowerment; well-being; designing things that matter; diversity; participation; materiality; making; sensors and actuators; mobile devices; novel artifact design; hybrid materials and surfaces; bio-electric systems; multi touch and touchless interaction; social media; personal; community, and public displays; health informatics; information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D); children-computer interaction; sustainability; and new media. More information about the conference may be found online at http://dis2014.iat.sfu.ca/.

This year DIS is for the first time organizing a Student Consortium with the goal of expanding student attendance and training in this area. The Student Consortium will be held as a full-day event on June 22, in parallel with the other conference workshops, and will provide participating students with exposure to their research community, with an opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback from peers and senior researchers in the field, and with ample time to start building a professional support network of peers and mentors. There were over 20 applications from students requesting to participate in the event, and the conference has accepted 12 of these, 3 of whom are from the United States. Each student will make a short presentation, followed by an open discussion and feedback from their peers. A senior researcher will be appointed as a mentor for each student, to lead the discussion, ask questions, and provide specific feedback. At lunch, sandwiches will be available in the session room so students can engage in general discussion with peers, with posters available for reference; in the evening, students will attend a group dinner for follow-on discussion and community building. All student participants receive free conference registration, a shared hotel room accommodation for the duration of the conference, and need-based travel support. The event organizers made special efforts to recruit women and members of under-represented groups; to further increase participant diversity, no more than one student per university or research institution will be supported.