The grant will support student travel to the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO 2012). CGO is a top conference in the area of advanced compilation techniques, such as feedback-directed optimizations and attuning. Supporting student travel to attend professional conferences and workshops is a very important mission of the NSF. Broader impacts include building the next generation of researchers in this research area.
. All the student awardees attended U.S. universities at the time of the symposium. This grant enabled students to attend the symposium who might not otherwise have been able to afford the travel expenses. It was especially beneficial for the students who presented papers or poster sessions. These students gained valuable experience discussing their research with experts in the field, which exposed them to future research and employment opportunities. CGO 2012 was held successfully March 31 through April 4, 2012, in San Jose, CA. There were 162 paid attendees, of whom 46 (29%) registered as students. 26 papers were published in the conference proceedings, and all but one had authors affiliated with universities. The attendees and authors were from 23 countries, mostly the United States, followed by China, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Spain, and Taiwan. The dominant themes of the papers and live presentations were optimization, compilation, code generation, parallelism, profiling, instrumentation, managed runtime systems, program characterization, translation, and architectural support. This annual event is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society. Co-sponsors and contributors in 2012 included Google, Intel, VMWare, Microsoft, Oracle, Quic, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Principal Investigator was Ronald Mak, who was the symposium Registration Chair and who is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at San Jose State University (CA), where he teaches the undergraduate and graduate compiler design courses. Adam Welc, Adobe, was the Students Chair, and he led the Awards Committee that decided the awardees of travel reimbursements from the NSF grant. Student applicants for the travel reimbursements each submitted a resume, a cover letter stating the student's reason for attending CGO 2012 and a description of his or her research interests, and a letter from the student's advisor that confirmed the student's eligibility and recommended that the student attend CGO 2012. The selection process considered each applicant's level of participation in CGO 2012 (author and/or presenter), followed by how closely the student's research interests matched areas covered by CGO 2012, and, in the case of undergraduate and fresh graduate students, the advisor's endorsement stating the student's potential for research. Following the close of the symposium, the awarded students each provided a one-page report on their impressions of CGO 2012, which were all duly read by Prof. Mak.
