Democratizing access to computational tools: The 7th annual VL/HCC graduate student consortium

The seventh annual graduate consortium at VL/HCC addresses the question: How can researchers and designers of computational tools support problem solving and information manipulation by diverse user populations? For the seventh year, the U.S. National Science Foundation continues its sponsorship of a graduate student consortium at the VL/HCC Symposia (NSF grant # IIS-0929989). These workshops, on themes related to diversity and universal access of software development technologies, have brought together graduate students, faculty mentors, and conference attendees to discuss the innovative work of the students and provide feedback and suggestions on their research. The events have produced considerable excitement and community building around approaches for reaching broad populations.