This project involves supporting students to attend the ACM Sigmetrics conference to be held in London, UK in June 2012. Sigmetrics is the premier conference in the area of performance modeling and it is important to expose students to this conference, particularly in an environment where students tend to shy away from mathematical modeling. The students will be chosen based on a open competition and preference will be given to students who don't have any existing support or belong to underrepresented groups
A major component of science is the dissemination of new results to the scientific community. Consequently, an important piece of training to be a scientist is participation in scientific meetings. This participation can take place in a variety of ways that include presentation if papers, presentation of posters, participation as part of the audience, taking notes of lectures, and interaction one on one or in small groups with other scientists. This project was concerned with enabling PhD students, as part of their training, to participate and engage in the most important annual conference dedicated to the performance evaluation of computer systems and communication networks. This international conference, the joint SIGMETRICS/ Performance conference was sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP), the two professional societies dedicated to computer science, and held in London, UK on June 11-15, 2012. The funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), consisting of $10,000 was used to support the attendance of ten PhD students (at $1000 each) studying at American universities to this conference. The selection of these students was done by a committee based on a careful assessment of the studnets' potential to benefit from attending this meeting. In addition to attending the conference, which included several activities direccted to students, such as a student poster session, the awardees were asked to act as scribes during the technical sessions. The outcome of this scribing process was a summary of each technical paper and lecture along with the questions and discussion that followed each paper. These summaries have been compiled into a single document that describes the technical program and has been made available to the scientific community.
