This grant provides NSF support to broaden participation in the Sixteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2012), to be held in London, UK in March 2012. 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 groups.
(ASPLOS 2012) brought together roughly 300 multi-disciplinary researchers that span the boundaries of hardware, computer architecture, compilers, languages, operating systems, networking, and applications. ASPLOS provided a high quality forum for scientists and engineers to present their latest research findings in these rapidly changing fields. It has captured some of the major computer systems innovations of the past two decades (e.g., RISC and VLIW processors, small and large-scale multiprocessors, clusters and networks-of-workstations, optimizing compilers, RAID, and network-storage system designs). ASPLOS is co-sponsored by ACM SIGARCH, SIGOPS, and SIGPLAN. The main program contained 37 top-quality papers and 7 workshops/tutorials. Commitments for travel awards were made well before the conference to enable those supported to register early at lower rates. In addition to NSF support, the conference also had support from Google and VMWare (for a specific workshop). The availability of travel grants was widely publicized. The vast majority of the awards were granted to PhD students. Priority was given to US-based students, with the highest priority given to US citizens and permanent residents. We also prioritized students who have authored papers accepted for presentation at the conference or its joint workshops, in particular those students without existing travel support. We specifically encouraged under-represented groups of students to apply and use that as a factor in the selection process. Student applicants were asked to provide the following materials: (1) a resume; (2) a cover letter stating the student’s reason for attending ASPLOS, as well as a description of how his/her research interests related to the conference; and (3) a message from the student’s advisor: a) confirming a good academic standing, b) recommending that the student attend ASPLOS, and c) providing a brief description of the existing travel support available to the student via research grants or other funding sources. We awarded 18 students, all from US-based institutions. Each student was awarded USD$833.33, which is higher than normal because ASPLOS was help in London, UK, a high-cost area. Decisions on the awarding of travel support under this award were done by the PI following the recommendations from the travel grants chair Derek Murray of University of Cambridge. The general chair of the conference was Tim Harris from Microsoft Research and the program chair was Michael Scott from University of Rochester.
