This award sponsors undergraduate and graduate student attendance at the 28th ACSAC, to be held December 3-7, 2012 in Orlando, Florida. The ACSAC conference is a top-tier academic security conference which attracts about 200 highly skilled security professional attendees per year. ACSAC regularly brings together leading minds in academic, governmental and commercial computer security to address the most pressing problems in applied computer security and to discuss seminal works in Computer Security. In addition to keynote Invited Essays and Distinguished Practitioner talks), ACSAC includes a "Classic Papers" series, in which two or three authors of seminal papers in computer security are invited to update those papers and present lessons learned. These papers, available free on the ACSAC web site, familiarize a new generation of students with key security research developments of the past, and provide a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate instruction. Supported students have an opportunity to meet and interact with notable figures at the conference.
The 28th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) was held Dec 3-7 in Orlando FL. There were 275 attendees from 27 countries attending five days of tutorials, workshops, panels, keynote speeches, and refereed papers. Among the 275 attendees were 73 students. ACSAC is a highly selective security conference. Of over 200 papers submitted, 44 were accepted for inclusion in the conference and publication in the proceedings, resulting in an acceptance rate of less than 20%. NSF funding allowed ACSAC to provide sponsorship (registration fees and travel support) to US students whose home institutions were unable to provide funding, representing: UC Berkeley Purdue University Pennsylvania State University University of Pittsburgh Columbia University University of Oregon UC Santa Barbara University of Arizona Florida State University University of Texas at Arlington Florida Institute of Technology ACSAC also provided funding from general registration fees for non-US students from Canada and Italy who received financial support to participate in the conference. An additional 40 students received discounted registration fees, paid by ACSAC from general registration fees. In total 18 students received support to attend ACSAC - 2 undergraduates, 8 Masters and 8 PhD students. No junior faculty were supported. Of the 18 students, 4 were women. ACSAC supported running the TracerFIRE training class, a forensic and incident response exercise program that was developed by Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, as part of its one week program. There were 42 attendees to this class, with 18 students receiving registration fee waivers through NSF support to attend this training exercise. ACSAC supported a further 4 students to attend. In short, students are an integral part of the ACSAC community. They are encouraged to interact with speakers and experienced government and industry experts through sessions, luncheons, and receptions. ACSAC appreciates NSF support in allowing us to expand our historical support for student participation in the conference.
