This proposal seeks travel support for US-based student participants to the 12th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security (SSS 2010) to be held in New York City during September 20-22, 2010. With the rapid growth of large-scale networks, the issues of stabilization, safety and security have assumed critical importance in dynamic distributed systems. To foster the growth of research in these areas and to maintain global leadership in the future, it is vital for US-based students to participate in this symposium, meet the leaders in these disciplines, and update themselves on the state-of-the-art.
While stabilization helps distributed systems spontaneously recover from the effects of failures and environmental perturbation like user demands and node mobility, safety and security are of critical significance in a world where physical and cyber security are under constant threat. Atendance to the SSS conference will enable US-based students gain first-hand knowledge in the key areas of stabilization, safety and security in networks and distributed systems, and bring back the knowledge to their home institutions for the enrichment of their research. The broader impact of this proposal is that US-based students will be better prepared to maintain global leadership in a competitive world. The travel support will be used to specifically encourage the participation of women and minority students, so that these underrepresented communities become motivated towards advanced computer science education and research.
Intellectual merit. This grant enabled five PhD students from US institutions attend the International Symposium on Self-stabilizing Systems (SSS 2010) held in New York City, and gain first hand knowledge in the key areas of stabilization, safety and security in the context of distributed systems. It also enabled them to identify key problems of current and future importance from an international group of researchers working in these areas. The students carried this knowledge into their PhD research, which will enable them to make new contributions in these areas of research, and help improve the quality of their PhD dissertations. Broader impact. We live in a networked society. The scale and the complexity of these systems are steadily growing. Most of these systems are dynamic in the sense that processes spontaneously join and leave the system, user demands change unpredictably, and processes or links fail from time to time. Such perturbations can potentially impact the performance of large distributed systems. To maintain the functionality of such systems, it is important that these systems are able to spontaneously recover from perturbed configurations without external intervention. This is the goal of research in stabilization. In addition to stabilization, safety and security are also of critical significance in a world where physical and cyber security are under constant threat. The ability to gain knowledge in these areas will help US maintain global leadership in a competitive world. The US-based students in Computer Science will be benefited from the exposure to newer areas of research. Five students: Andrew Berns (University of Iowa), Aly Farahat (Michigan Tech), Sally Wahba (Clemson University), Taylor Johnson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and H. K. Acharya (University of Texas at Austin) were offered the travel grant, of these, one is a woman.
