Last Revised: April 29, 2020
Applicants must be enrolled as full- or part-time undergraduate or graduate students for the 2021 school year, ideally, during the conference dates: (October 24 - 9). We may request proof of enrollment be provided. Post-Docs will not be considered.
In the spirit of transparency, we continue to provide selection statistics for each year since 2017.
You can see them here:
2017, 2018,
2019, 2020
We will be implementing a new rolling system in which we will select student volunteers on a two week cycle (or a weekly or daily cycle if necessary) in order to accommodate pre-conference duties. This means that every two weeks beginning from August 5th, a number of student volunteers will be selected and added to the reserve of volunteers. Volunteers can then accept tasks as soon as they are selected and could even finish their 10 - 15 hours of work before the conference in October.
Every year the conference receives many more student volunteer applications than can be accommodated as the number of positions available is limited. Our aim is to build a volunteer cohort that will be reliable, courteous and hard-working, to represent the broad institutions of the VIS community, and to provide additional support to student presenters. We score each application using a points system:
Presenter at (highest one of following):
Additional points will be granted for:
Additionally, to ensure broad participation, we limit volunteers to no more than 3 per institution and 2 per advisor. We limit individuals to no more than three years of volunteering without transitioning into a supervisory position. Previous volunteers who proved unreliable (e.g., not performing task duties, gaming the task system, inaccurate application materials, etc.) will not be selected.
We select the top-scoring applicants representing 90% of the slots each while maintaining our institutional/research group limits. Ties are broken first to promote broader representation of countries, institutions and then by lottery.
The remaining 10% of slots are filled by a weighted lottery of applicants who have not volunteered before and to ensure broader representation of countries.
We aim for at least 20% of all volunteers total to be early in their graduate programs and for wide representation.
If we require more volunteers closer to the event due to volunteer cancellations or other unforeseen circumstances, we may bypass previous scores and limits to select new volunteers.
We reserve the right to reject any volunteer application for any reason. This right has not been exercised often in the past.
To obtain the 30 point bonus, SVs must be reliable. Reliable volunteers:
There are the following exceptions to bypass the selection process.
Each day of the conference and for the entirety of that day, one non-chair student volunteer supervises the others, ensuring tasks are covered and records are kept. Prior to the conference, the SV chairs determine which volunteers will perform these duties on which days. Once the conference schedule is available, SV chairs will solicit availability from a subset of selected student volunteers with prior IEEE VIS SV experience and construct the supervisor list. The SV chairs choose experienced volunteers who have demonstrated reliability and responsibility in their role.
Each year, one current chair will resign and one future chair will be selected, barring extenuating circumstances. The current chairs will select the future chair while keeping these criteria in mind:
A fourth chair, local to the conference venue, may be selected for one year at the discretion of the conference committee.
For more information, please contact the IEEE VIS 2018 Student Volunteers Chairs:
Thomas Torsney-Weir, University of Vienna
John Wenskovitch, Virginia Tech
Tim Luciani, University of Illinois at Chicago
Fumeng Yang, Brown University
Tim Gerrits, University of Magdeburg
Email:
visweeksvchairs@gmail.com