This project provides funding support in order to make awards to graduate students to attend the 44th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2014) to be held in Atlanta, Georgia on June 23-26, 2014. The IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) is a premier international conference for presenting the research results, problem solutions, and insights on new challenges in dependability and security of computer systems and networks.
DSN 2014 will provide many and varied opportunities for student submission and participation. These opportunities range from full-length conference and workshop papers to medium-length preliminary contributions considered by the Student Forum to brief descriptions of early-stage research in the Work in Progress category. This project is focused primarily on broader impacts through the education students will receive from attending the technical sessions of DSN, mentoring that they will receive through the Student Forum activities, and networking opportunities they will receive through numerous different conference activities.
This award provided funds to support travel grants for graduate students to attend the 2014 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, better known as DSN. Fifteen graduate students from U.S. universities were awarded travel grants, which covered the students' workshop and conference registration fees and, in some cases, partially covered hotel room costs. The funds also helped to attract matching funds from IEEE and IFIP, which were used to provide travel grants to 13 international students. Combining these sources, 28 students were provided an opportunity to attend DSN, which they otherwise might not have been able to do. Twenty percent of the U.S. students who received awards were female, a group which has traditionally been extremely underrepresented at DSN. After the conference, SurveyMonkey was used to collect anonymous feedback from the U.S. travel grant awardees concerning their experiences in attending DSN and their satisfaction with the travel grants they received. Eleven out of the 15 awardees completed the survey. Some of the highlights of this survey were as follows. The first set of questions was intended to assess the travel grant program itself. Six of the 11 survey respondents had received travel support to attend one or more other conferences. Of these, 3 reported the amount of the award was about the same as the others they had received, two reported that the DSN award was more than they had received previously, and one reported that the DSN award was less than their previous award. Ten of the 11 respondents rated their satisfaction level with the award as 5 out of 5, and the 11th rated their satisfaction level as 4 out of 5. The second set of questions was intended to assess the value of conference attendance to the awardees. 65% of the awardees reported that they attended "most or all of the conference", while the remaining 35% attended "more than half of the conference". The majority attended the first day of the conference (workshop day) , which involved smaller group settings than the sessions of the main conference. About half of the awardees presented their research, either in a workshop or in the student forum or fast abstract sessions of the main conference. All awardees reported talking to other attendees about their research, 40% received mentoring from a senior researcher, 80% got inspiration for a new research idea or topic, and 30% established a new research collaboration. Overall, the survey results indicated that satisfaction level was very high with the travel grants program and awardees benefitted from the grants in a variety of ways including receiving career mentoring advice, generating new research ideas, and even establishing new research collaborations in some cases.
