The ACM SIGCOMM Conference will be held from August 13 to August 17, 2012 in Helsinki, Finland. 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 proposal requests funding to assist approximately 10 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 support requested in this proposal will enable people in the above categories to attend the main SIGCOMM 2012 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 2012 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: 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 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.
The ACM SIGCOMM conference is one of the two premier venues in networking. It invites research contributions to the field of computer and data communication networks. The conference features a high-quality technical program, with an acceptance rate of around 10% out of around 300 submissions. Offers significant opportunities for individual and small-group technical and social interactions among a diverse set of participants. SIGCOMM is also an international conference that stimulates exchanges between various international research communities. SIGCOMM'12 was held in Helsinki, Finland. The goal of this project was to help increase the representation and participation of United States-based students in the conference. Support from NSF was obtained to help cover (in part) the expenses of 11 US-based graduate students, 1 US-based undergraduate and 1 post-doc; also, 5 of the award recipients were female. Students and postdocs get significant value out of the opportunity to attend the SIGCOMM conference. The conference provides students with an opportunity to interact with leading researchers in the field and to be exposed to the presentation of cutting-edge research works and ideas, interactions which are vital to the success of the field. In addition to attending technical presentations and having followup discussions with conference participants, the students have additional 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 for young women in the field; and the conference banquet. The technical community that has developed around the SIGCOMM conference works towards the development of new technologies for computer communication that can broadly impact the daily lives of people worldwide. Moreover, a number of important technologies (including the OpenFlow standard, that began, in part, as a series of papers published at SIGCOMM) and startups (including Nicira, Big Switch, and CoBlitz, and most recently a new startup called DataMi that was based on ideas that were published by one of the student travel grant awardees at the SIGCOMM'12 conference) have emerged from this community, contributing to the growth of the technology industry which is a crucial driver of the American economy.
