Doctoral Consortium

Chairs: Gitte Lindgaard, Manuel João Fonseca
doctoral@interact2011.org

The INTERACT 2011 Doctoral Consortium is a forum for PhD students to discuss their research goals, methods, and results at an early stage in their research. The Doctoral Consortium aims to provide useful guidance for completion of the dissertation research and the initiation of a research career in a friendly and constructive atmosphere.
The Doctoral Consortium will be held on 5 and 6 September 2011. The Consortium will be a closed event, open only to the selected participants and other invited attendees.
The Doctoral Consortium and INTERACT 2011 provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with other students, established researchers, and the broader HCI community. PhD students who are currently working in an HCI related field are eligible to apply. Doctoral Consortium candidates should ideally have worked on their dissertation for at least six months. They should have chosen a research focus and possibly also have selected theoretical and methodological approaches and begun to conduct their research. To benefit from the Consortium students should have at least 6-12 months of work remaining before the expected completion of their theses. The number of participants in the Consortium will be limited. Selection for the Consortium will be based on the quality of the submission, its relevance to HCI, the relevance of the student's contribution to the Consortium, and the potential benefit of the Consortium to the student's research. Students selected to attend the Doctoral Consortium will be asked to present their work to get feedback for future directions. Consortium attendees are free to submit a paper or contribution to any of the other tracks at INTERACT 2011 on content similar to that in the proposal for the Doctoral Consortium.
Each prospective PhD student participant must submit a package of materials, consisting of two parts for consideration by the Doctoral Consortium Committee, no later than 7 April 2011. The first part must be submitted electronically using the conference submission system at https://precisionconference.com/~interact. The second must be submitted via e-mail directly to one of Doctoral Consortium chairs.
Part 1: Extended Research Abstract

The research description should be in PDF format, up to four pages long, formatted according to the conference paper format, and must include:
The title of the work.
The student's name, university, address and e-mail address.
Name and e-mail address of the dissertation advisor/supervisor.
The research area or sub-area of the work (ten words or less).
Related submissions (e.g., the student is also submitting a paper to INTERACT 2011).
A brief description of the research topic (25 words or less).
A description of the research problem to be solved, why it is important and a justification that prior research has not solved the problem.
The research hypothesis (claim).
The methods used or proposed to use to carry out the research; it is important to describe a plan for evaluating the work and presenting credible evidence of the results to the research community.
A sketch of the proposed solution.
The expected contributions of the PhD research.

Part 2: Letter of Recommendation
The letter of recommendation should come from the student's PhD advisor/supervisor, or head of school, or equivalent, supporting the student's nomination for the Consortium. This letter should include the student's name, a candid assessment of the current status of the PhD research, an expected date for dissertation submission, an assessment of what the student would bring to the Consortium, and how the student would benefit from attendance. The letter should be in PDF format, and must be e-mailed to the Doctoral Consortium chairs (doctoral@interact2011.org).
The accepted four-page research abstracts will be published in the special Doctoral Consortium proceedings and will only be distributed to participants of the Doctoral Consortium.
Students whose proposals are accepted for presentation at the Doctoral Consortium will be offered support in the form of waived conference fees, but will have to fund their own travel and accommodation expenses.