This proposal requests funding to assist approximately 15 US-based graduate students to travel and attend the Seventh Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI-2010), which is to be held in San Jose, CA on April 28-30, 2010. The support requested in this proposal will enable the participation of students, especially those from under-represented groups, who would otherwise be unable to attend NSDI-2010.
Description of Grant: The 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '10) focuses on the design and implementation of large-scale networks and distributed systems. The goal is to bring together researchers from across the systems and networking communities to foster cross-disciplinary approaches and to address shared research challenges. This year's program included 29 technical papers carefully selected out of 175 submissions. The high-quality papers represent a diverse range of research areas including cloud services, Web browsers and servers, datacenter and wireless networks, malware, and more. The symposium was held in San Jose, CA, on 28-30 April 2010. The USENIX Association offers stipends to most conferences that they host. Any student enrolled full-time at an accredited university or college is welcome to apply for a stipend. Stipends have two components: registration costs and expenses. For those students selected, USENIX covers the registration costs by providing students with a complimentary registration code. For the expense portion, USENIX provides a check to assist the student with costs related to airfare and hotel. Variations in the amount of offers depends on how far a student will need to travel and the amount they request (i.e., some students may stay with a friend in the town of the conference, and therefore, do not need the hotel expense). USENIX confirms that the students register and attend the event. Criteria for applications include: (1) Students who are participating in the conference, e.g., presenting a poster; (2) Students whose areas of study significantly overlap with the conference topics and who write a concise essay (supporting statement) outlining their research; (3) First-time applicants and those who have not received a stipend in the past 12-months; (4) Students who are willing to volunteer at the conference (this generally consists of writing a summary of technical session(s) for ;login:, the USENIX journal); (5) Students from institutions not traditionally represented at USENIX events; (6) Student members of the Association (not required); and (7) Class level and financial need. Results of Grant: USENIX received 69 stipend applications from students, and 50 were awarded grants. Some of the funds were covered by the $12,000 from NSF, and all NSF grant recipients were enrolled at US universities. USENIX appreciates the financial support of NSF, which allowed them to grant awards to many more qualified applicants than they would have been able to otherwise. There were 239 total attendees at NSDI '10. Of these, 193 were from the US. Non-US attendees came from: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Participating in conferences such as NSDI is one important component in the training and development of graduate students in the areas of systems and networking. The student travel support program provided stipends that enabled a larger number of students to attend NSDI and benefit from the training and development opportunities that it offered. Contributions: The main contribution of this grant is toward the training and development of the 16 systems and networking graduate students who attended the conference through the travel support program. As part of the travel program the awardees volunteered their assistance as scribes to record the technical discussions for the benefit of the greater research community. This is available in the form of a conference report online and will appear in ;login:, the USENIX magazine. Publications and Website: The publication that came from the conference is "Seventh Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation", Proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2010. More information can be found at www.usenix.org/events/nsdi10/tech/. This website has the conference articles and a .pdf of the proceedings.
