This award assists approximately 20 US-based graduate students to travel and attend the Eighth Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI-2011), which is to be held in Boston, MA on March 30, 2011. This support enables the participation of students who would otherwise be unable to attend NSDI-2011.
This grant was used to provide travel and registration funding for Ph.D. students to attend the 8th USENIX Symposium on Network Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI'08). NSDI is a leading conference in the area of networking and distributed systems. In this area of computer science, "conference" publications are similar to journal publications in other fields: The conference included 27 high-quality peer-reviewed publications, each presented by one of its authors. The symposium was held in Boston, MA from March 30 - April 1, 2011. Twelve students were funded to attend NSDI by this travel grant, all from U.S. universities, including three from EPSCoR states (one from Louisiana State University and two from Louisiana Tech University). In addition, the funding from NSF provided a stable base from which to solicit corporate donations to cover additional student travel grants: In total, 66 students applied for travel grants and 62 were awarded. 11 of the 12 students funded by the NSF grants were first-time conference grants recipients, and for many of them, NSDI was the first conference in their field of study that they had attended. Several of the travel grant recipients were asked to write summaries of the conference sessions, which are published in ;login, the USENIX journal. This mechanism provided a double benefit: In addition to providing for wider dissemination of the research results and discussion at the conference, it provides some of the first-year students with a first opportunity for their writing to appear in a widely-read journal. The support from NSF was instrumental in enabling more students to attend than would have been able to otherwise, and provided a valuable educational and community-building experience for the students.
