The investigator will use the funds from this grant to support the travel of students to the 2008 SIAM Data Mining (SDM 2008) Conference on Data Mining. This conference will be held in Atlanta, USA from April 24th to April 26th, 2008 (www.siam.org/meetings/sdm08/). Jointly organized by computer scientists and statisticians, this technical conference is a premiere venue for presenting new research results in the area of data mining, and is widely attended by researchers and practitioners in the field. Selection of award recipients will be done on the basis of quality of their research progress, as well as the potential to benefit from attending this meeting. Special emphasis will be given to graduate students, and in particular women and under-represented minority students, since attending conferences is an important part of their educational experience, and they often have limited travel funds.
Attending conferences such as SDM is of paramount importance for the development of graduate students. Participants have the opportunity to present their work, attend panel and keynote sessions, and interact with hundreds of others performing leading-edge research in the field. Such experiences help students in a number of ways ways. First, it enables them to get exposure to a wide range of cutting edge ideas in their field, beyond what they are likely to be exposed to in their home institutions and research groups. Second, it provides them an opportunity to meet established researchers, which can potentially lead to long term interactions and mentoring relationships. Third, in case they are presenting a paper, it provides an opportunity for early feedback on their thesis research and presentation skills from a broad audience. All of these benefits are invaluable in ensuring the development of research excellence, leading to a productive career in innovative research. Given that cutting edge innovation is critical to the United States' economic preeminence in the world, and a future workforce trained to be innovative is critical for it, the proposed project is well aligned with the national agenda.
