This award will help to help support student attendance at the IEEE Annual Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 23 through October 26, 2010, as well as attendance by qualified postdoctoral fellows who do not have other sources of travel funding. FOCS and its sister conference, the ACM STOC meeting, are the premier broad-based conferences on the Theory of Computing. In recent years the attendance at FOCS has been roughly 250 plus or minus 25. 40% or more of the attendees have been students, for whom the conference serves as a valuable educational experience, both in terms of the technical content of the talks and the opportunities for networking that it provides. This award will provide partial support to twenty or more student attendees, covering shared hotel rooms and travel. (Student registration will be supported by other means.)
Attendance at conferences is very important for Phd students and postdoctoral fellows to learn about new research ideas. It also gives them an understanding of the social context of the field and helps develop them as productive and independent individuals who will be the research leaders of tomorrow. The funds from this grant enabled many young researchers who would not otherwise have been able to do so to attend conferences at the forefront of theoretical computer science. The 51st IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2010) sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing (TCMF) brought together roughly 250 researchers from around the world to learn about the latest developments in theoretical computer science. In addition to the presentation of 78 carefully-selected research papers, the conference included three heavily-attended tutorials on topics including the insights of theoretical computer science on the design of economic mechanisms and uses of deep mathematical analysis to attack the fundamental P versus NP question. The conference also included a special lecture by the most recent winner of the Nevanlinna Prize, a quadrennial prize that is the analog of the Fields medal for theoretical computer science. Conference attendance included 84 students, of whom 21 were supported by this travel award. Two postdoctoral fellows were also supported by this award. These funds were used to support travel and accommodation only. Email requests for travel support for FOCS 2010 were widely solicited prior to the conference. Registration fees for the 21 students supported by this travel grant were covered by a separate amount of one-time support from the IEEE TCMF. After official approval, the small portion of allocated funds not spent for FOCS 2010 were allocated for student support for FOCS 2011, the 52nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, which brought together a similar number of researchers as FOCS 2010. In addition to the 84 papers accepted for presentation, there were three tutorials on differential privacy, environmentally=aware computing, and fully homomorphics encryption that were aimed at a broad theoretical computer science audience. Also, the lecture associated with the presentation of the IEEE Edmund R. Piore Award, the top award givenm by the IEEE in all of computer science, was given at the conference. Conference attendance for FOCS 2011 included 84 students, four of whom were supported by this award (one whose support was partial, with the rest shared with a separate somewhat smaller NSF grant supporting FOCS 2011). Again, email requests for travel support for FOCS 2011 were widely solicited prior to the conference. The financial support under this award was for travel and accommodations only. Student registration support was again provided by separate funds through the IEEE TCMF.
