The ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference will be held August 17-22, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois. ACM SIGCOMM is the flagship annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery?s Special Interest Group on Data Communications. This award financially assists approximately 16 graduate students and 3 postdoctoral researchers from US institutions to attend this conference. Participation in conferences such as SIGCOMM is an extremely important part of the graduate school experience, providing students with an opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and exposure to leading edge research in the field. The award will enable graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, who would be otherwise unable to do so, to attend the main SIGCOMM 2014 conference and the associated workshops. The travel grant chairs encouraged the participation of women and under-represented minorities.
Intellectual Merit: This award provides travel support for US-based graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to attend the ACM SIGCOMM 2014 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 among researchers from all over the world.
Broader Impacts: This project integrates research and education of students through exposure to a premier technical conference in computer networks and communications. Students and junior researchers 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. 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 cultivates international research interactions and presents a tremendous opportunity to students and junior researchers to increase their breadth of ideas and technical perspectives.
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. It invites research contributions to the field of computer and data communication networks, including the areas of network architecture, design, implementation, operations, analysis, measurement, and simulation. The conference features a high-quality technical program, with an acceptance rate of around 10% out of around 300 submissions. It has a single-track session, which 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. The ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference was held between August 17 and August 22, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois. The goal of this project was to provide financial assistance for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from US institutions to attend the conference and the associated workshops. The primary objective of the project was to support as many students as possible while encouraging participation of women and under-represented minorities. An effort was also made to promote diversity by providing assistance to students from universities not traditionally represented at SIGCOMM. We received 60 applications for the NSF travel grant from students (58) and postdocs (2) in US institutions. We awarded 22 students (including 6 female students, 5 student from universities not traditionally represented at SIGCOMM, one minority student) and 1 postdoc. This project integrated research and education of students through exposure to a premier technical conference in computer networks and communications. By creating new opportunities for students and post-doctoral researchers -- especially those from under-represented groups -- to attend a high-quality conference, the project benefited the research community in several ways. The students benefited from the opportunity to meet and interact with many other researchers in a favorable setting, and from seeing research presented that may be related to what they are working on, or may inspire them to try a new direction. The research community benefited from the improvement of the students in the pipeline, and the introduction of new researcher perspectives. Everybody benefited from increased diversity of participants attending the conference. The SIGCOMM conference is also a forum where researchers from academia and industry mix to discuss research topics and introduce to students future job/internship opportunities. Furthermore, the truly international flavor of SIGCOMM 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 presented a great opportunity for students to increase their breadth of ideas and technical perspectives.
