Networking Networking Women (N2Women) fosters connections among women in networking and communications research community in which women are underrepresented. This award supports students from U.S. institutions to attend the Second N2Women Workshop co-located with IEEE INFOCOM 2012, the 31st Annual International Conference on Computer Communications. INFOCOM will be held March 25-30, 2012 in Orlando, Florida. The N2Women workshop is scheduled on the day before the main conference begins (Monday, March 26th, 2012), allowing the attendees to form connections that can then be strengthened if they also attend the conference. Priority is given to students who will benefit from attending the workshop, but are unlikely to attend due to the unavailability of travel funding. Students attending the workshop are encouraged to stay and attend INFOCOM.
Intellectual Merit:
The intellectual merit of this proposal includes contributions that the student participants themselves will gain from and make to the N2Women Workshop; the information and connections that could positively impact their future research, and the co-location that allows them to participate in INFOCOM 2012, a premier conference in networking and communications. The exposure to the technical content of the N2Women Workshop (and to INFOCOM 2012 if they attend) is expected to inspire students to address challenging research problems in their field and to help them meet their long-term research goals.
Broader Impacts:
The broader impact of this proposal is the professional development of the under-represented graduate students that under this grant are able to attend the N2Women Workshop. The grant provides these graduate students the opportunity to attend high-caliber technical presentations from keynote speakers, be exposed to state-of-the-art research in a poster session, participate in mentoring sessions with leading researchers, and network with fellow graduate students. The goal is to make long-term positive impacts on the students? careers.
Networking Networking Women (N2Women) is a community to foster connections among female researchers in networking and communications. N2Women allows women, who are under-represented in these fields, to connect with others who share the same research interests, attend the same conferences, face the same career hurdles, and experience the same obstacles. NSF Award 1228498 supported the travel of 22 students to attend the second N2Women Workshop, held on March 26, 2012 in conjunction with the 31st Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2012) in Orlando, Florida. In organizing the program, effort was made to promote diversity spanning race, stage of career, and career choice. The workshop, a one-day event which attracted 65 participants, included two keynote presentations: "Computing in Cirrus Clouds: The Challenge of Intermittent Connectivity" by Ellen Zegura, Professor and Chair of the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and "First Nails Then Hammers" by Helen Wang, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. It also included two panels: "How to Succeed in Grad School without Really Trying" and "Successful Promotion and Tenure." A poster session provided the opportunity for students to showcase their own research and had two goals: To create new research connections among participants and to obtain feedback from members of the community. Finally, the day ended with a Mentoring Session led by the keynote speakers and panelists on topics related to career choices, among others. From the survey, conducted by the Computing Research Association (CRA), the second N2Women Workshop as a whole was determined to be a great success. For details about the workshop, please see the final report for NSF Award 1228498.
