The ACM SIGCOMM Conference will be held in India for the first time in its history. The conference will be held between August 30 and September 3, 2010, in New Delhi, India. ACM SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Data Communications, a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery. This award financially assists approximately 12 graduate students and 3 postdoctoral students from US institutions to attend this conference. Participation in conferences such as SIGCOMM is an extremely important part of the graduate school experience, provides students with an opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and exposes them to leading edge research in the field. The award will enable people in the above categories to attend the main SIGCOMM 2010 conference, who would be otherwise unable to do so. The travel grant chairs are committed to encouraging the participation of women and under-represented minorities.
Intellectual Merit: This project proposes to provide travel support for US-based graduate and postdoctoral students to attend the main SIGCOMM 2010 conference. SIGCOMM is the flagship conference in the networking community and a highly competitive venue (with acceptance rate around 10%). Its rich program exposes participants to new ideas and cutting-edge research and allows for interaction between researchers from all over the world.
Broader Impact: First, this project integrates research and education of students through exposure to a premier technical meeting in computer networks and communications. Students will have the opportunity to observe high-quality presentations and interact with senior researchers in the field. The proposed student participation is expected to have a positive impact on the students' research interests and quality. Second, the project will promote diversity by encouraging and enabling women and other under-represented minorities to participate. Furthermore, the truly international flavor of SIGCOMM as an annual conference is well-known and reflected in the composition of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) as well as in the authors of the submitted and accepted papers. As such, it cultivates international research interactions and presents a tremendous opportunity to students to increase their breadth of ideas, research approaches, and technical perspectives. Third, as part of this student travel grants program, the PIs are developing an online submission system, based on the widely successful hotcrp, which they will make publicly available for use in the community.
The ACM SIGCOMM conference is the flagship conference of the ACM SIG on Data Communications and one of the two premier venues in networking today. SIGCOMM 2010 was held in New Delhi, India. As expected, the travel grant program was highly competitive: It received 276 completed paper submissions and accepted 33 of them. The main conference was augmented by two days of five workshops as well as poster sessions. More information about the conference can be found at: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2010/. The purpose of the ACM Sigcomm Travel Grant Program was to increase the representation and participation of United States-based graduate students and postdocs in the conference, by partially covering their expenses. The goal was to make the cost of attending the conference in India no more expensive than if the conference had been help in the U.S. For many of the grantees, this support was critical: e.g., for students without an accepted paper, or postdocs that presented work with a past affiliation, an NSF travel grant was a unique opportunity to obtain funding for travel. Students receive significant value out of attending SIGCOMM. They get an opportunity to interact with leading researchers in the field; they get exposed to cutting?edge research and ideas. These opportunities are vital to their development and eventual success in the field. In addition to attending technical presentations and having follow?up discussions with conference participants, the students also have opportunities for a range of interactions in the following events: the highly successful student dinner; the poster presentations – a venue for preliminary results; the N2Women meeting; the conference banquet. Detailed information about the ACM Sigcomm Travel Grant Program can be found at the website: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2010/grants.php Additional support. While NSF support played a critical role in travel support for ACM Sigcomm 2010, it was only part of the support. Support was also provided by Euro?NF, the ACM Geodiversity Program, the ACM Sigcomm Executive Committee (through registration and corporate support), the Indian Government, and the Delhi Government. Total travel support was more than $100,000, of which NSF provided 25%. NSF support was used to provide 25 $1000 grants to students. But overall, more than 200 grants were given. The average amount was $1000, but students in India received much less because of much lower travel costs. Some attendees also received supplements to register for workshops.
