This project will support abut six doctoral students enrolled in United States institutions to attend the 28th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026) and participate in the ICMI 2026 Doctoral Consortium that will be held in October 2026. ICMI covers a range of topics around designing, developing, and evaluating multimodal interfaces and human-centered AI systems that are becoming commonplace in communication technology, educational software, health-tracking apps, and accessible computing systems. Novel technologies such as multi-biometric multimodal interfaces, runtime-efficient human interaction systems, and unbiased human-in-the-loop decision-making systems also promise significant contributions to individual and national security, environmental sustainability, and societal benefit. The Doctoral Consortium provides PhD students with an opportunity to present their work to a group of mentors and peers from an international and diverse set of academic and industrial institutions, to receive feedback on their doctoral research plan and progress, and to build a cohort of young human-computer interaction and multimodal modeling researchers. Doctoral Consortium participants will present their work both at the Doctoral Consortium itself and at the main conference poster session; the submissions will be archived in the conference proceedings and the ACM Digital Library.
Adequate financial support for student travel is expected to play a major role in whether or not these students attend and participate in the conference, particularly at a time when many institutions are cutting back or eliminating funds for international conference travel for students. Students from all PhD granting institutions who are in the process of forming or carrying out a plan for their PhD research in designing and developing multimodal interfaces and artificial intelligence to enhance human-human or human-computer interaction are invited to participate. The organizers will widely advertise the availability for support to attend the doctoral consortium, and students will be selected based on their need for support and guidance, and their ability to contribute to the intellectual and institutional breadth of the conference.
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.