Graduate Symposium

NEWS:  (scroll down for details)

• Guest talk slides available
• Feedback forms & assigned mentors announced
• Proceedings available
• Poster and presentation preparation guidelines available
• Guest talk and student presentations announced

The goal of the Diagrams 2016 Graduate Symposium is twofold. Firstly, the Symposium will provide senior graduate students and recent Master's and Doctoral graduates with the opportunity to present their research, and receive feedback from established researchers who will provide comments on each of the presentations. Secondly, the Symposium will provide students with an opportunity to network with each other as future colleagues.

At past Diagrams Graduate Symposiums, lively and useful discussions have enabled students to receive suggestions about their on-going research and allowed more experienced participants to hear some fresh ideas and view some of the new trends in the field.

Participants will be selected for the Graduate Symposium based on the submission of a 3-page report describing their research (see the Submission section). Submissions will be peer reviewed. Summaries of accepted submissions will be available online on the conference website (as an example, see Diagrams 2014 Graduate Symposium proceedings; scroll down for this year's proceedings).

All students who seek funding from the Diagrams conference must participate in the Graduate Symposium as explained in the Participation Expectations and Financial Support sections.

Submission

Submissions that focus on any aspect of diagrams research are welcome.

A 3-page report describing

• the thesis topic,
• the approach being taken,
• the work that has been completed,
• the expected contributions of the research, and
• aspects of the work on which advice is desired

must be submitted via the EasyChair system by 21st March 2016.

The submission should be prepared following the LNCS style guidelines, and one student can only submit one report.

Participation Expectations

• Graduate students whose Graduate Symposium submission is accepted will
  • give a presentation at the Graduate Symposium, and
  • present a Graduate Symposium poster at the poster session of the main conference.

• Students who have a poster in the main conference and are attending the symposium will
  • present the poster at the poster session of the main conference, and
  • give a presentation at the Graduate Symposium.

• Students presenting a long or short paper in the main conference will
  • not give a presentation at the Graduate Symposium,
  • but all students who receive student funding from Diagrams 2016 will be required to attend the Graduate Symposium.

Financial Support

Financial support through the NSF and the Diagrams Conference fund will be granted to:

• all graduate students whose Graduate Symposium submission is accepted, and
• a number of other students presenting a paper or poster at the main conference who
  • submit a Graduate Symposium report by the symposium submission deadline and
  • fully conform to the Participation Expectations.

Support will range from free registration to additional travel support.

Guest Talk

Title:	Preparing for Academia: How to have a Successful Career
Slides:	Download the slides here
Speaker:	Dr Gem Stapleton Visual Modelling Group Director, University of Brighton, UK Diagrams Steering Committee Chair
Abstract:	The Diagrams Graduate Symposium has a key goal: to support early-stage researchers with shaping their research direction, helping them prepare for life as an academic. I have been invited to speak on how to have a successful academic career. In my opinion, planning research and related activities is paramount from early on, in order to realise career goals. To do this successfully, understanding what future employers will be looking for in terms of skills, achievements, and track record is essential. In this talk, I will focus on what I believe to be the most important elements of a track record when pursing an academic career, aside from research topic, and what you can proactively do to achieve them. These elements include publication record, networking activities, and community service, alongside having a clear career plan. By drawing on my own experience, I will aim to provide some hints and tips on how to make informed choices when devising a publication strategy, how to confidently network and how to begin contributing to conference organisation, peer reviewing and collaborative research as your career unfolds.
Biography:	Dr Gem Stapleton is Chair of the Diagrams Steering Committee and is Director of the Visual Modelling Group at the University of Brighton. In her role as Reader in Computer Science at Brighton, she was Course Leader for the university-wide research methods training provision for research students. Reflecting her desire to support researchers at all career stages, Gem co-founded the Indian Winter School on Diagrams, aimed at PhD students and early career researchers, which first ran in 2015 and is due to run again in 2017. Gem currently supervises five PhD students whose research projects are closely aligned with the Diagrams conference, has supervised three PhD students to completion and externally examined PhD theses. She has also acted as a mentor to post-doctoral researchers who have gone on to secure academic positions and research grants. With a background in mathematics, Gem's multidisciplinary research includes developing diagrammatic logics and automated diagram layout methods. She complements this formal work with empirical studies into the impact of properties of diagrams on user understanding. Gem's research has received five Best Paper prizes and her research on concept diagrams led to industrial take-up at Nokia; the impact of this research was judged to be internationally excellent by the UK's Research Excellence Framework 2014 evaluators. To-date, Gem has over 100 publications and her research has been supported by major grants from the UK's EPSRC and the Leverhulme Trust. She is also a Visiting Professor at Jadavpur University in India and a Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University in Japan. https://sites.google.com/site/stapletongem

Student Presentations

Ordered in alphabetical order. See the full program for the running order of these presentations.

Information for Presenters

All students presenting at the Graduate Symposium must:

• Prepare, print and present a poster showcasing their Graduate Symposium work;
• Present a 1-min poster pitch on August 8 during the poster session;
• Give a 20-min presentation* on August 9 during the Graduate Symposium
  (check the full program to find out your session).
  *each 20-min presentation will be followed by 5 minutes of questions

Detailed instructions about the poster, poster pitch and presentation are available on the Presenter Instructions webpage.

Proceedings

The Diagrams 2016 Graduate Symposium proceedings is available here.

Feedback Forms

All Graduate Symposium attendees (students, non-students, panelists, etc.) are encouraged to fill in these feedback forms to provide constructive comments to our Graduate Symposium students to help them improve their research work, its presentation and defence. Your feedback (after attending the students' presentation) is highly appreciated!

Session	Presenter	Title	URL to feedback form
1	Robert Baker	Overview of Graph Drawing Using Patterns	https://goo.gl/forms/X84gUPAVf3dod5AZ2
1	Rwitajit Majumdar	SAT Diagram: An Interactive Visual Representation for Learning Analytics	https://goo.gl/forms/bcDesDKMGkOFbxkh1
1	Rebecca Noone	Perceptual Inventory: Contemporary Art as a Strategy for Studying Everyday Information Visualizations	https://goo.gl/forms/K3p8fNpkHR1HF04P2
2	Ouhao Chen	To Diagram or to Summarize When Studying Scientific Materials: Examining the Effect of Expertise	https://goo.gl/forms/g8bZOb4LlRsf52mw2
2	Lisette Firet	Mind Control or Not? Do Flow Charts Harmonize Information Processing?	https://goo.gl/forms/3OpkcnCZXzylO7Ai2
2	Abdulkream Alsulami	The Inferential Advantages of Diagrams in Reasoning Tasks	https://goo.gl/forms/slVScG1Uwc8262ic2
2	Dominique Tranquille	Evaluating the Effects of Graphical Properties in LineSets	https://goo.gl/forms/cSxXr7jZB9S096bF2

Panelists & Mentors

A panel of 4 professors from diverse institutions will be attending each session. The role of the panel is to give expert feedback and constructive comments to the presenters in that session about their research and presentation. Panelists should also fill in the above feedback forms as thorough as possible for each of the students in their session. Additionally, each student has been assigned a mentor. This mentor is one of the professors in the panel of that session. After the session, the presenter and the mentor should meet (e.g., over lunch) for a more in-depth discussion about the presenter's research and presentation.

Session	Panelist	Mentor for
1	Dave Barker-Plummer (Stanford University, USA)	Robert Baker
1	Emmanuel Manalo (Kyoto University, Japan)	Rwitajit Majumdar
1	Margit Pohl (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)	Rebecca Noone
1	Simone Kriglstein (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)	-
2	James Corter (Columbia University, USA)	Ouhao Chen
2	Atsushi Shimojima (Doshisha University, Japan)	Lisette Firet
2	Yuri Sato (Keio University, Japan)	Abdulkream Alsulami
2	Peter Cheng (University of Sussex, UK)	Dominique Tranquille

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 21 March 2016
Notification: 11 May 2016
Camera-ready: 27 May 2016
Diagrams Poster session (also for Graduate Symposium participants): 8 August 2016
Graduate Symposium sessions: 9 August 2016

Questions

Send an email with 'Graduate Symposium' in the subject to the Diagrams 2016 organizing committee email address. The Graduate Symposium chair, Luana Micallef, will get back to you as soon as possible.