This proposal requests NSF support to broaden participation in the Sixteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS?10), to be held in Newport Beach, California on March 5?11, 2011. ASPLOS is the premiere forum for research involving the interaction of computer architecture, compilers, and operating systems. It brings together leading researchers from these diverse communities to one conference offering opportunities to interact across traditional disciplinary boundaries. This proposal aims to increase the impact of this conference by enabling participation by additional students and faculty for whom travel support would otherwise preclude their attendance, priority for these funds will be given to defray the travel expenses of under-represented minorities and faculty from non-Ph.D. granting institutions.
The International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) is the premiere forum for research involving the interaction of computer architecture, compilers, and operating systems. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers in fields related to computer architecture, compilers, and operating systems, for technical exchange on topics at the interaction of these disciplines as well as new emerging research areas that transcend these traditional disciplinary boundaries. This proposal increased the impact of this conference by enabling participation by additional students and faculty for whom travel support would have otherwise precluded their attendance. Funds were provided to defray travel expenses, and priority was given to under-represented minorities and faculty from non-Ph.D. granting institutions. The remainder of this report is organized as follows. Additional ASPLOS details are provided in Section 1. Section 2 describes the travel support application process and the travel award details. The report concludes in Section 3 with a brief discussion of broader impacts. 1. Conference Details ASPLOS ’11 was held in Newport Beach, California on March 5–11th, 2011. The first two days were dedicated to six co-located workshops and tutorials. The conference programwas comprised of one keynote talk and two and one-half days of paper presentations, a student poster session, and an "Ideas and Perspectives" session. The conference organizing committee, the program committee, and the conference program can be viewed at http://asplos11.cs.ucr.edu/. ASPLOS is one of the top conferences in the field of computer architecture, compilers and operating systems. This year ASPLOS received 152 submissions, compared to 181 for 2010 and 113 for 2009; 32 papers were accepted, yielding an acceptance rate of 21% (the acceptance rate was 19% in 2010). The conference addresses a broad spectrum of concerns for computer architecture, computer systems, and programming languages including multicore computer design, sensor network management, cloud computing management, graphics systems design and programming, power and reliability issues, and new non-traditional computing models. Detailed descriptions of the workshops, tutorials and the full technical program are available on the conference web site. The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is held annually. ASPLOS was co-located with the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE, website: www.cs.technion.ac.il/~erez/vee11/VEE_2011/Home_Page.html). This co-location allowed allow students to amortize their travel expenses across two conferences. The lead organizers of ASPLOS ’11 are Professor Rajiv Gupta of the University of California, Riverside (general chair) and Professor Todd Mowry of Carnegie Mellon University (program chair). Travel grants were administered by Professor Philip Brisk of the University of California Riverside (travel grant chair). 2. Travel Grant Details The NSF provided $15,000 in travel support. Three ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) provided an additional $16,000 in travel support. ACM SIGARCH provided $10,000, and ACM SIGPLAN and SIGOPS each provided $3,000 respectively. The general strategy was to prioritize NSF funding for instructors from non-Ph.D. granting institutions, women, and underrepresented minorities. The ACM SIGs preferred to fund students who were already members or students whose research closely aligned with the interest of the SIGs (e.g., SIGPLAN preferred to fund students whose research focuses on programming languages, as opposed to SIGOPS which has a focus on operating systems. Travel grant awardees were allowed to purchase membership in the SIG that provided the funding as a pre-condition to receiving those travel grant awards. Altogether, ASPLOS received 90 applications for travel grants; 86 of the applications were funded: 39 by NSF, 28 by SIGARCH, 11 by SIGPLAN, and 8 by SIGOPS. The total amount of funding requested by all applicants was $115,134; most applications included conference and/or workshop registration, transportation, and hotel costs. With $31,000 in available funds, it was not possible to fully meet the needs of all applicants. 3. Broader Impact This proposal had two primary direct benefits. First, those applicants receiving travel support personally benefitted from the opportunity to engage in the all-important technical, professional and social exchanges that ASPLOS fosters. Second, the ASPLOS conference was indirectly strengthened as a result of the greater attendance that this travel support will enable. More broadly, we increased the attendance of under-represented minorities and women by exposing them to ASPLOS. We also exposed several faculty members, whose primary job function is teaching, to the state-of-the-art in research in one of more of their respective disciplines. We created the opportunity for these faculty members to share this research with their students and to influence their teaching to be more relevant to the current problems in research and practice. Seventeen women received $6,575 total in funding. Two underrepresented minorities received $2,000 total in funding; one, who received $1,500 in funding is also a lecturer at a non-Ph.D. granting institution. Two non-underrepresented minority faculty from non-Ph.D. granting institutions received $1,300 total in funding.
