The 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) will be held from December 6th to December 9th 2011 on the campus of the University of Tokyo in Japan. This award funds 10 US-based graduate students to attend this conference. Participation in conferences such as CoNEXT is an extremely important part of the graduate school experience as it provides students with an opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and exposes them to leading-edge research in the field. ACM CoNEXT is unique in its emphasis on interactions between networking researchers at an international level; and attending CoNEXT is an excellent opportunity for US graduate students to connect with a thriving international research community. A special student workshop will be organized in association with CoNEXT that will enable students to present and obtain feedback on their work in progress. The support from this award will enable students to attend the main conference and associated workshops at CoNEXT 2011. The travel grant chair is committed to encouraging the participation of women and under-represented minorities.
Intellectual Merit: This award provides support for graduate students to attend CoNEXT 2011 and the associated workshops, which include the student workshop, the Workshop on Internet of Things and Service Platforms, and the Special Workshop on the Internet and Disasters. This rich program will expose students to new ideas, and allow them to interact with other researchers. In particular, the student workshop is geared to provide students an opportunity to present their work in progress, receive feedback on their work, and obtain valuable experience in writing and presenting technical papers.
Broader Impact: This project integrates research and education of students through exposure to a premier technical meeting in computer networks and communications. Students will have the opportunity to observe high-quality presentations and interact with senior researchers in the field both in the main conference and the associated workshops. The proposed student participation will have a positive impact on the quality of their research. Women and other minorities will be encouraged to participate. A distinguishing feature of the CoNEXT conference is its truly international flavor which presents a tremendous opportunity to students to expand their breadth of ideas, research skills, and technical perspective.
1 The International CoNEXT Conference The 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) was held in Tokyo, Japan, from December 6 to 9, 2011. This project provided funding to assist US-based students in attending this conference. Participation in conferences such as CoNEXT is an extremely important part of students’ research training experience as it provides students with an opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and exposes them to leading edge research in the field. CoNEXT is unique in its emphasis on interactions between networking researchers at an international level, and attending CoNEXT is an excellent opportunity for US students to connect with a thriving international research community. The support provided by this project enabled students to attend the main conference and associated workshops at CoNEXT 2011. These students would have otherwise been unable to attend the conference. 2 Publicity To ensure an equal opportunity for all interested individuals to apply for the travel funds, the program was advertised in several ways, including an announcement on the CoNEXT 2011 web page and an announcement on the SIGCOMM digest email mailing list and several other research mailing lists. The National Science Foundation was acknowledged for the sponsorship of student travel grants prominently in multiple ways including the electronic conference and travel grant announcements, the Internet home page for the conference, the student travel grant web page, the printed proceedings and during the conference, as it has been done in previous years. 3 Application An application for a travel award consisted of the student’s vita, a letter from the student, and a letter from the student’s advisor. 4 Decision Criteria and Procedure A deadline of October 6, 2011 was set for the receipt of applications. The applications were submitted online to the CoNEXT 2011 Travel Grant Chair Prof. T. S. Eugene Ng. Award recipients were notified on October 12, 2011. Recipients were required to accept the awards immediately, so that alternates could be notified in the event that a recipient declined. The recipients of the travel awards were selected based on the CoNEXT 2011 travel grant’s stated objectives: "Special efforts will be made to recruit student participants who are underrepresented in STEM disciplines, and who are coming from diverse institutions. In making student travel grant decisions, students with accepted papers at the CoNEXT 2011 Student Workshop will be given higher priority. The committee prefers students who are not authors of a main conference paper or of a IoTSP or SWID workshop paper." Based on these objectives, the Travel Grant Chair proposed a list of selected recipients to the 7-member CoNEXT Steering Committee for final approval. Out of 16 applications from US-based students, 8 were selected for an award, for a total acceptance rate of 50%. Three of the recipients were underrepresented in STEM disciplines. Only 2 US-based applicants were student workshop authors and they were from the same institution, so only one student receiving NSF funds was a student workshop author. Among students that were not student workshop authors, students that did not have a paper accepted in the main conference or one of the other workshops were given preference, following guidelines provided by the CoNEXT Steering Committee. Since all the students were US-based and traveling overseas to Japan, the award sizes were similar, ranging from $1740.16 to $1948.99. 5 Reimbursement Procedure The Travel Grant Chair collected the original receipts from each student and after carefully reviewing all the material, a check was issued by the Research Office at Rice University and mailed to each grant recipient. A copy of all the paperwork processed is on file with the Research Office at Rice University. 6 Award Recipients The list of students that received an NSF travel grant for CoNEXT 2011 is as follows. • Vijay Adhikari, University of Minnesota (non-author) • Lara Deek, University of California Santa Barbara (female, conference paper co-author) • Abishek Gopalan, University of Arizona (non-author) • Shuai Hao, University of Southern California (conference paper co-author) • Qingxi Li, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (female, conference paper co-author) • Michael Miller, University of Texas Austin (conference paper co-author) • Xiaozheng Tie, University of Massachusetts Amherst (female, conference paper co-author) • Balakrishna Venkataraman, North Carolina State University (student workshop co-au
