Graduate ConsortiumVL/HCC 2020

The primary goal of this year’s event is to stimulate graduate students’ and other researchers’ thinking about the design of programming languages, APIs, diagrams, models, and supporting tools that include and support diverse and underrepresented populations in computing. This goal aligns with the theme of the 2020 VL/HCC main conference.

Accepted Papers

Call for Participation

The primary goal of this year’s event is to stimulate graduate students’ and other researchers’ thinking about the design of programming languages, APIs, diagrams, models, and supporting tools that include and support diverse and underrepresented populations in computing. This goal aligns with the theme of the 2020 VL/HCC main conference.

Society has a clear need for broader participation in computing. One way to support broader populations in entering and remaining in computing is by ensuring that the design of computing systems supports all users.

Although there are many recent and ongoing efforts to support diversity in computing, there still remain many open questions about how to design computing systems that fully support all users.

The 2020 GC aims to encourage and advance research both on understanding the needs of underrepresented groups in computing and the design of computing systems that support these groups.

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 to help cover your cost of attending VL/HCC
• NSF funding to support travel (TBD).

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 VLHCC20-GC in the subject line to Mike Lee.

• 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. Please submit your abstract using the easychair link on the right.

• 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 to Michael Lee & Steve Oney (mjlee@njit.edu, soney@umich.edu). 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 are applying to the National Science Foundation to support participation.

Schedule

The consortium event will be a full day either Monday or 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:

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