This project seeks to help support student attendance at the ACM Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) in Palo Alto, California, June 1-June 4, 2013, the 45th annual occurrence of this meeting. STOC, together with the IEEE FOCS meeting, are the premier conferences on the Theory of Computing in North America. In recent years the attendance at STOC has consistently exceeded 300 people. A large fraction of the attendees have been students, for whom the conference serves as a valuable educational experience, both as regards the technical content of the talks and the opportunities for networking that it provides.
The purpose of this award was to help support student attendance at the 45th ACM Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC), which was held in Palo Alto, California, from Saturday, June 1 through Tuesday, June 4, 2013. STOC, together with the IEEE FOCS meeting, are the premier broad-based conferences on the Theory of Computing in North America. STOC is a conference of long standing that has played a formative role in the eld and continues this role as one of the most important venues for groundbreaking research in theoretical computer science. STOC attendence in recent years has been more than 300 people per year; a large fraction of the attendees have been students, for whom the conference serves as a valuable educational experience, both through the technical content of the talks and the opportunities for networking that the meeting provides. SIGACT (the ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) applied for and was granted the award. The funds provided by this award supported 15 students, from a range of different institutions and educational backgrounds, to attend STOC 2013. The award provided support towards registration fees, shared hotel rooms, and travel. The students who received support included ones who had papers at the conference as well as students who did not. It is commonly more difficult for students in the latter group to obtain travel support from their local institution, so the award made it possible for a number of students to attend STOC who likely would not otherwise have been able to attend. The intellectual merit of the award consists in its having enabled a broad group of students to be exposed to cutting-edge research across a broad range of topics in theoretical computer science. The broader impacts of the awards consist in its giving students an opportunity to engage in the important technical, professional and social exchanges that STOC fosters.
