This grant will support travel and subsistence for graduate students to attend a doctoral symposium held in conjunction with the ESEC/FSE conference taking place this year in Hungary. FSE is the Foundations of Software Engineering symposium, which is a key conference for the core software science and engineering areas of the NSF/CISE/CCF Software and Hardware Foundations (SHF) program. Periodically, FSE is held together with ESEC, the European Conference on Software Engineering, which is the case this year. The funding will increase the number of US citizens and permanent residents who are able to attend the doctoral symposium, where a distinguished international panel of faculty members will provide feedback on dissertation research. The grant will also help the students travel to the main conference, which is important to their careers. The international experience for the students is also important to the students careers, and contributes to the goal of developing globally aware workforce.
This project helped to nurture and train some of the next generation of computer science software engineering researchers by broadening the participation of graduate students in research community activities. Attendance at top-tier academic conferences is critical to encourage student interest in the community and to help struggling doctoral students to complete their higher education studies. To ensure rigor, only students with accepted, peer-reviewed publications in the relevant Doctoral Symposia were considered. Students were selected in a need-blind manner based solely on intellectual merit. Selected received partial support for their travel and conference registration expenses. This project attracted some matching external industrial funding and was ultimately able to support a number of students -- predominantly US citizens and permanent residents. Students supported by this project reported that they were slightly more likely to continue their gradute studies and slightly more confident in their abilities to write a doctoral dissertation after attending than before. Ultimately the project was deemed successful; an indicative student comment is, "It was enlightening to see not just what other students are working on, but what their research processes involve. The Ph D working groups were particularly interesting to me, as performing `interviews' as required by the program acted as a very easy ice-breaker to talk to people who I might otherwise have been shy to approach."
