Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2025 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

This award provides funding to support about seven promising U.S.-based graduate students to participate in the Graduate Consortium at the IEEE Conference on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) in October 2025. VL/HCC is the premier international forum for research on the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and programming languages that are easy for people to learn, use, and understand. The Graduate Consortium format is oriented toward training and learning by involving experienced panelists who will provide constructive feedback to student participants. Participants will also interact with IEEE VL/HCC conference attendees who will learn from and provide additional feedback to the students, to the faculty, and to each other. Through participating in the Consortium, students will develop professional skills and networks that will help advance their own research and careers, as well as the future of research in this community. Beyond work to develop the next generation of VL/HCC researchers, the Graduate Consortium also gives participants practice with communicating their research to a broader audience of non-technical users, an important skill for connecting their research with the needs of the general public. This year's Consortium will emphasize the theme of human-AI collaboration, a rapidly growing area aligned with U.S. science priorities. The organizers will solicit applications from a wide range of sources in order to find qualified candidates in this space who can grow the community, including applicants from minority-serving institutions, institutions that have rarely participated in VL/HCC before, and from non-computing departments that have traditionally not been included in the conference but whose disciplinary skills are critical for developing effective human-AI collaborations. Students will submit applications describing their research and its connection to VL/HCC, as well as their financial need (and ability of faculty advisors to support any part of their expenses that can't be covered by the award). Students will be selected based on the potential of their research and their likely benefit from attending the Consortium. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.