Call for Participation

Call for Participation

The primary goal of this year’s event is to stimulate graduate students’ and other researchers’ thinking about “Low-Code / No-Code Development”. This development paradigm enables the creation and deployment of fully functional applications using visual abstractions and interfaces and requiring little or no procedural code to empower users in creating software applications for constrained domains, even if they lack a programming background. This goal aligns with the theme of the 2023 VL/HCC main conference. Other areas within the remit of VL/HCC are also welcome.

Why You Should Participate

Present your work to a smaller, more attentive audience
Get detailed, critical, constructive feedback from a diverse panel of experts
Meet other students working on similar problems
Travel funding may be available to help cover your cost of attending VL/HCC (details below).

Who Can Participate?

The consortium is open to both Master’s and PhD students worldwide. Participation is particularly encouraged from PhD students who are close to proposing a thesis, as well as from members of groups identified by NSF as underrepresented in the sciences and engineering. If multiple applicants from a particular university apply for the consortium this year, then no more than two per university will be selected to participate. To be eligible, each applicant may have participated no more than once in the VL/HCC graduate consortia of past years.

Application Process

Email the following items with VLHCC23-GC in the subject line to Anita Sarma at anita.sarma@oregonstate.edu and Brittany Johnson at johnsonb@gmu.edu.

A 2-page research abstract, formatted as a PDF in the standard IEEE Conference Proceedings format. NOTE: Accepted participants’ abstracts will be included in the conference proceedings. To make it easier for you to write a successful abstract, we provide examples from past years below.
Your curriculum vitae (CV), as a second PDF file. This CV should mention whether you have previously participated in any graduate consortia at any conferences.
A letter of recommendation sent directly by your thesis advisor. This letter should summarize your accomplishments and describe how far along you are in your master’s or PhD program, why attending the GC this year would be important for you, and please ask them to mention if you have already attended VL/HCC GC in any past year. In addition, if you are a member of a group designated by NSF as underrepresented, then the letter may mention this fact.

Selection Process

For one-third of the slots, students who have participated once before will be given priority. The remaining slots will be given to students who are new to the event. Each student from the returning group will be linked with new students in a mentoring arrangement. See Who Can Participate? above for additional selection criteria.

Posters

Selected students will be asked to present a poster on their work at the Showpieces Reception during the main conference. Details will be provided to accepted applicants.

Travel Support

We expect to be able to offer partial funding for travel expenses for US participants to attend, contingent on the availability of funds.

Schedule

The consortium event will be a full day event on October 3, the Tuesday before the main conference. All participating students are expected to attend the main conference as well as the graduate consortium. Other conference attendees are invited to attend the consortium, to listen to the presentations, to interact with participants, and to give feedback to presenters. More details will be provided, closer to the event, including times and locations.

Examples of Successful Applications

To be successful, a submission to the VL/HCC Graduate Consortium generally has to have the following parts:

The paper starts with a sentence or two that describes a real-world setting.
It then identifies a problem in that setting.
The remainder of the paper’s introduction outlines an approach for solving that problem.
In a subsequent section, the paper describes a prototype or preliminary study showing the feasibility of that approach.
The paper explains why more work is still required in addition to this prior work.
The paper concludes by describing future work that will build on this prior work in order to finish completing the approach.
Somewhere along the way, the paper explains how the approach builds on, or differs from, other related work.

We have annotated three excellent submissions that exemplify the pattern described above. We hope that you will find these examples thought-provoking and helpful as you design your own submission this year.