Doctoral Consortium
The UMAP 2012 Conference, following a tradition started in 1994, will include a Doctoral Consortium Session. Students will benefit in several ways by participating in the consortium; primarily by presenting work to a knowledgeable audience, but also by meeting established researchers and other graduate students working in the field.
Doctoral students are invited to apply to present their research to scholars and researchers in the field who will provide constructive comments about their work. Students are expected to document in a brief submission the thesis topic, the approach to be taken and the amount of work that has already been completed. Good quality applications will be chosen by the consortium committee to present their work in a short (15-20 minute) presentation, which may include a demonstration if appropriate.
Each student will be assigned a mentor who will provide feedback on the student’s work, and collate feedback from other Program Committee members. Students whose submissions are selected for presentation will be asked to submit a short list of questions to the committee to help identify areas where the students feel that the Committee can be of assistance. After the presentation, these and other questions can be discussed with the audience of the Consortium.
The Doctoral Consortium will be conducted in one or two separate sessions, totaling about 3-4 hours in length. A limited number of fellowships will be available to enable students with accepted contributions to participate in the meeting. Consult the Student Support section.
Accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings, which will be published as a book by Springer. In addition, the Proceedings will be made available on the World Wide Web.
Suggested Topics
Just as the research in User Modeling spans different areas, graduate research may cover a wide range of topics, but should contribute to some aspect of user modeling and user-adapted interaction. These include (but are not limited to) the topic areas listed:
Purposes of UMAP
User Characteristics for UMAP
Application domains for UMAP
Environments for UMAP
Computational methods for UMAP
Architectures for UMAP
Methods for design and evaluation of UMAP
Usability issues for UMAP
How to Submit
Students are asked to submit via the conference web site an abstract of maximum 4 pages (including references and pictures) describing their doctoral research. Submissions should be in the Springer LNCS format specified in the main conference UMAP2012 Call for Papers. Only pdf documents will be accepted. The document should comprise keywords identifying the thesis main topic areas, a statement regarding the main contributions that the thesis aims to achieve, a description of the approach, and information regarding the amount of work that has already been completed so far, and the timing for this work. Students should also include the stage they are in the PhD programme, and a brief description of their background in order to enable the committee to adapt its assistance to each student.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: March 26, 2012
Notification date: April 16, 2012
Contact
For more information, please contact the DC chairs:
Lora Aroyo, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Robin Cohen, University of Waterloo, Canada ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
James Chen Best Student Paper Award
The best student paper at the UMAP 2012 will be given the James Chen Award. Apart from the honor, it carries a cash reward of $1000.
This award was established by the family of Dr. James Rong Chen, who had been a research computer scientist in the Computational Sciences Division of NASA for eight years before his death on May 1st, 2001 in an automobile accident on his way home from work. Jim had been working in the area of personalized information retrieval and had published two widely cited papers in UMUAI.
For more information on James Chen, the Award and previous winners, please visit the um.org Website and navigate to Awards.
Student Support
Students who will attend UMAP 2012 can apply for travel support. Authors of accepted technical and doctoral consortium papers will receive highest priority.
To apply for UMAP student travel funding, please send to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. :
- An email from your department or Ph.D. advisor stating exactly how much, if any, travel funding is available from all institutional sources such as your institution’s student travel fund or your advisor’s research grant/contract. Preference will be given to students who can get at least some support from other sources. If you are uncertain as to whether some funds will be available (e.g., you have or will apply for student travel funding from your institution, but have not heard back yet), please state the award amount expected, when you expect to find out, and your estimate of the likelihood that you will be awarded those funds.
- An itemized summary of your anticipated travel, registration, and accommodation expenses (see UMAP website for actual costs).
- Optionally any personal (e.g., gender, ethnicity, region of origin, and/or disabilities) or institutional characteristics (e.g., country and state/province) that would merit consideration in striving for a diverse set of funded students. This information is completely voluntary. If you leave out the information, we will just assume that you belong to the most numerous group.
