This award supports student attendance at the 60th IEEE Annual Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) in Baltimore, Maryland from November 9 through November 12, 2019, as well as to support attendance by some qualified postdoctoral fellows who do not have other sources of travel funding. FOCS and its sister conference, the ACM STOC meeting, are the premier broad-based conferences on the Theory of Computing. FOCS has a record of strongly encouraging participation by students, for whom the conference serves as a valuable educational experience, both for the technical content of the talks and for the opportunities for networking that it provides. In recent years, the annual FOCS conference has been attended by eighty to one hundred students who have comprised more than a third of all attendees. This award will provide partial support to about 20 students.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
