This project supports the travel of 10 graduate students and 2 postdoctoral students from U.S. institutions to the SIGCOMM 2013 conference. The ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference will be held between August 12 and August 16, 2013, in Hong Kong. ACM SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Data Communications, a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery. SIGCOMM is a very highly selective (<14%), high-quality conference sponsored by the ACM. The conference is a major forum for presentation and discussion of important research results in networking. Recipients of the travel grants will be selected via a widely advertised competitive process involving submitting a travel grant application and review by a travel grant committee associated with the SIGCOMM organization.

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. The proposed student participation is expected to have a positive impact on the students' research interests and quality. Second, the project will promote diversity by encouraging and enabling women and other underrepresented minorities to participate. Furthermore, the truly international flavor of SIGCOMM as an annual conference is well-known and reflected in the composition of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) as well as in the authors of the submitted and accepted papers. As such, it cultivates international research interactions and presents a tremendous opportunity to students to increase their breadth of ideas, research approaches, and technical perspectives.

Project Report

The ACM SIGCOMM conference is one of the two premier venues in networking. It invites research contributions to the field of computer and data communication networks, including the topic areas of network architecture, design, implementation, operations, analysis, measurement, and simulation. The conference features a high-quality technical program, with an acceptance rate of around 10% out of around 300 submissions. It has a single-track session, which offers significant opportunities for individual and small-group technical and social interactions among a diverse set of participants. SIGCOMM is also an international conference that stimulates exchanges between various international research communities.SIGCOMM'13 was held in Hong Kong, China. The goal of this project was to help increase the representation and participation of United States-based students in the conference. We received 46 applications from US students to receive partial funding. The support from NSF was used to help cover the expenses of 17 US based students: 4 undergraduate entering Ph.D and 13 graduate students. Among those, 6 of the award recipients were female, who collectively received more than a third of the total project funds. In fact, all qualified candidates coming from female or minority got awarded. Here are some of the outcomes of the attendance of SIGCOMM '13 by recipients of the Student Travel Grant: Three grantees received mention in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC): In the undergraduate category, for 1st, 3rd place , and in the Graduate category for 3rd place.In fact all other students who received mention were not US based, so the NSF provided supported for all awarded students. One grantee (female) could present her first author paper that she was not going to present due to lack of funds. Another grantee presented a paper at HotSDN that received the Best paper award. Four grantees, including one female, subsequently published overall 6 papers at SIGCOMM '14. One grantee (female) subsequently received the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Presidential Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Her SIGCOMM '14 work appeared in MIT Technology review. Other grantees had published papers in 2014 at VLDB, NDSS , Eurosys. Students and postdocs get significant value out of the opportunity to attend the SIGCOMM conference. The conference provides students with an opportunity to interact with leading researchers in the field and to be exposed to the presentation of cutting-edge research works and ideas, interactions which are vital to the success of the field. In addition to attending technical presentations and having followup discussions with conference participants, the students will have additional opportunities for a range of interactions in the following events: the highly successful student dinner; the poster presentations--a venue for preliminary results; the conference banquet. The SIGCOMM conference is the home conference for a community who's goal is to develop new technologies for computer communication that can broadly impact the daily lives of people world wide. Moreover, a number of important technologies (including the OpenFlow standard, that began as "Ethane", a paper published at SIGCOMM'07) and startups have emerged from our community (including Nicira, Big Switch, and CoBlitz, and most recently, awardee Carlee-Joe Wong has created DataMi, a new startup based on ideas that were published at previous SIGCOMM conferences), all of which are crucial drivers of the American economy.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1341344
Program Officer
Joseph Lyles
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2013-06-01
Budget End
2014-05-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2013
Total Cost
$25,000
Indirect Cost
Name
Columbia University
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
New York
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10027