Call for Papers: Doctoral Consortium

The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS 2007) invites doctoral students to apply for the Doctoral Consortium. The consortium provides a great opportunity to doctoral students to share and discuss their research with other students and a panel of established researchers. The consortium has the following objectives:

Provide a forum for students to present their current research and receive feedback;
Promote contacts among doctoral students working in similar areas;
Support students with information and advice on their research.

The Consortium will be held on Sunday 14 October 2007 in Tempe Arizona. Approximately 10 students and four faculty members will be invited to attend and discuss each student's work in turn. Students will present their work during a poster session dedicated to the work of the Doctoral Consortium participants that will take place during the main conference.

Please note: the purpose of the Doctoral Consortium is to provide feedback to Doctoral candidates at an early stage of their research, to help guide and shape their research program. Student work that is complete, or near to completion, should be submitted as either a technical paper or poster.

Students submitting papers for the Doctoral Consortium may submit a different (and more complete) piece of work for the Student Research Competition, but may not submit the same work to both the Doctoral Consortium and the Student Research Competition.

Additional note: Upon request, American Sign Language interpreters will be provided for the Doctoral Consortium and all other ASSETS events. Requests for an interpreter must be indicated on the conference registration form when registering for ASSETS 2007.

Funding

The Doctoral Consortium is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Conference registration and basic travel expenses including airfare, hotel, and some meals will be covered for all students accepted to the Consortium. The ASSETS 2007 conference organizers express their deepest appreciation to the National Science Foundation for its support.

Doctoral Consortium Award

The best Doctoral Consortium contribution will be chosen by a panel of established researchers by looking at the quality of both the research and the presentation given at the consortium. The winner will give a presentation at the main conference to address all conference delegates (details will be announced later).

How to apply

We encourage submissions from current graduate students pursuing a PhD project related to accessibility (for more information about topics see the main conference call. Participants would benefit from detailed discussions of their doctoral research by a panel of established researchers. The consortium will operate in a workshop format, providing feedback on the participants' current research and guidance for future progress.

Submission checklist

Each application must contain the following materials:

Project summary. This must be two pages long in the ACM conference format including: title, author information, abstract, keywords, thesis research summary, and references. This extended abstract has to clearly address:

The problem that the proposed research is addressing.
The motivation behind this research including a broad comparison with the related literature.
The proposed solution including a brief description of the proposed methodology to the solution.
The status of the progress (what has been done and what needs to be done).
And finally, the envisioned contributions to the accessibility field.

Letter of recommendation. A letter from the primary thesis advisor/supervisor that briefly states what the advisor/supervisor expects from the student to gain from, and to contribute to the consortium.

Submission procedure

Submissions should consist of an extended abstract and a letter of recommendation and submitted to the ASSETS 2007 Doctoral Consortium Submission site ( http://www.easychair.org/ASSETSDC07 ) as a single ZIP file by the deadline of 13 July 2007 (for more information see the main conference submission procedures). Please DO NOT use the main conference submission site.

Review criteria

The Doctoral Consortium contribution will be evaluated against the following criteria:

Originality of work.
Importance of the work and potential impacts to the accessibility field.
soundness and correctness of the proposed approach to address the problem.

Publication

Following the Doctoral Consortium, the participants will be invited to submit revised and updated papers for publication in the January 2008 issue of the SIGACCESS Newsletter.

Important dates

Proposal submissions: July 13, 2007
Notification of acceptance: July 27, 2007
Camera-ready (for inclusion in a handout for Doctoral Consortium participants): August 8, 2007

Chairs

Clayton Lewis
University of Colorado, USA

Sri Kurniawan
University of Manchester, UK

Doctoral Consortium Presentations

Enhancing accessibility through correction of speech recognition errors.
John-Mark Bell
Accessmonkey: Enabling and Sharing End User Accessibility Improvements.
Jeffrey Bigham
Simulating HCI for Special Needs.
Pradipta Biswas
Improving the Efficacy of Automated American Sign Language Practice Tools.
Helene BrashearM.
Using Networked Multimedia to Improve Educational Access for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students.
Anna Cavender
Early Diagnosis of Autism through Analysis of Pre-speech Vocalizations.
Keshi Dai
Encouraging Speech and Vocalization in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
Joshua Hailpern
Mining Models for Non-Visual Web Transactions.
Jalal Mahmud
Increasing the accessibility of pen-based technology: An investigation of age-related target acquisition difficulties.
Karyn Moffatt
Older people and online communication: Investigating patterns of empathy and social support.
Ulrike Pfeil