The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) will take place just before the flagship programming language conference, Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2013), which is being held in Rome Italy. This grant will support 15 or more students to attend the PLMW event plus the POPL conference. While there is other funding available, this grant is intended specifically to increase the numbers of students from underrepresented groups and gives priority to US citizens and permanent residents. The broader impacts of the grant relate to the need to broaden participation, provide opportunities for students to receive mentoring from top members of the programming languages community, and build the next generation of researchers and knowledgeable practitioners in this important research arena.
Attending a conference can be a transformative experience for a young researcher: it exposes them to cutting-edge topics and introduces them to leading members of the community. Hence, encouraging studentattendance at conferences is critical for promoting the development ofthe next generation of researchers. In January 2013, the premier conference on the foundations of programming languages (POPL) was held in Rome, Italy. Historically, the participation of women and under-represented minorities at POPL has been low, as can be seen byexamining the past proceedings -- of the 148 POPL authors in 2011 and 140 authors in 2012, fewer than 10% are women. The goal of the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) was to help change this statistic by encouraging women and under-represented minorities to become members of the programming language research community. Building on the tremendous success of the first PLMW held in 2012, a workshop was organized to nurture students who have already shown interest in programming languages research. The major activity in this project was to fund travel scholarships for 84 senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students to attend PLMW and POPL. NSF support provided funding for 23 students based at US institutions. This support was critical for ensuring the success of PLMW in its second year.
