The award supports the attendance of twelve students to the International conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI), to be hosted in San Diego, January 19-21. VMCAI is a successful established conference that bridges the gap between the various methodologies that are used for formal verification. VMCAI been a source for much collaboration and cross-fertilization and has attracted many of the key researchers in the related fields. Students have much to gain from attending VMCAI like learning state-of-the-art methodologies, being exposed to novel techniques, and interacting with senior researchers in their chosen area of expertise.
The importance of formal verification is becoming widely accepted. Increasing the attendance of students in VMCAI will expose more students to the exciting developments in the field and in the long run will help to build a broad base of expertise in the field, which will impact both industry and academia.
VMCAI started as a bi-annual workshop in the late 1990s to provide a forum for researchers from the communities of Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation, facilitating interaction, cross-fertilization, and advancement of hybrid methods that combine these and related areas. Today VMCAI is a successful conference that bridges the gap between the various methodologies that are used for formal verification. VMCAI 2014 took place January 19 - 21, 2014, in San Diego, USA. The conference consisted of presentations of 25 accepted papers and invited talks of four distinguished speakers: Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Research, USA Prakash Panangaden, Mc Gill University, Canada Thomas Wies, New York University, USA This travel grant supported the travel of 12 US-based students to VMCAI 2014 at an average cost of $$1,099 per student. This amount covered travel costs, the conference fee, meals and a shared accommodation. The students were chosen among the pool of applicants, with priority being given to the under-representative groups. This award was publicly advertised on the VMCAI web site. In addition, we put a call for participation to various mailing lists. Moreover, to increase visibility we contacted leading researchers in the field and informed them about this travel award, asking them to advertise it further. The purpose of this grant was to allow students to attend the conference, meet with the leading people in their area of research, and interact with other students. After the conference we asked students to submit a small report on how this grant help them. All their answers are added to the full grant report. In general, we can see that all of the students said that this grant was significantly beneficial for their development as a researcher.
