This award provides travel support to U.S.-based students to attend the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2012), and to enable them to participate in a career mentoring forum to be held as part of the main conference. The conference will be held in Washington (DC), USA from April 1-5, 2012 (www.icde12.org). This conference provides a venue for researchers who are addressing problems in designing, building, managing, and evaluating advanced data intensive systems and applications. It is a leading forum for researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. It provides an ideal setting for students to learn about the state-of-the-art research in the field by hearing outstanding invited speakers and attending tutorials. There are seven focused workshops and six topic-specific tutorials that will be held in conjunction with the main conference.
In the past decade, data has exploded in its availability. There has been a rise in the number of data-rich sciences and application domains, such as social network analysis, bioinformatics, computational biology, link analysis, counterterrorism and security. The attendance of ICDE 2012 will expose students to cutting-edge research and to relevant applications in a variety of domains. Participation in the premier research conferences ICDE is an integral component of the training of Ph.D. students in data engineering. The conference is aimed at providing an opportunity for Ph.D. candidates to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentoring from established researchers in data engineering. Such feedback and mentoring is expected to improve the quality of the students thesis research. Similarly, students recipient of a travel award will be able to attend technical sessions, plenary talks, panels, tutorials and workshops. Participants will interact with peers who share similar interests from other universities, as well as hundreds of leading researchers from around the world. This experience will be fruitful towards the shaping of their future research endeavors. Both the student forum and travel awards will also help broaden the representation of women and members of underrepresented minority groups within the Data Engineering research community. Details of the student activities will be posted at www.icde12.org/nsf-fellowships/.
Thanks to the NSF funded project, travel support was provided to 30 students to attend the 2012 IEEE International Conference in Data Engineering held in Arlington, VA from April 1-5, 2012. The PIs organized the following events at the conference: (1) A career panel highlighting the different career paths for researchers in data analysis and engineering fields. (2) A mentor-mentee network was established that allowed students to connect and form partnerships with members from the industry. (3) Students presented their research work at a premier research conference and received feedback from a wide array of prominent researchers. (4) Encouraged women students and post-doctoral researchers to attend the event. Specific contributions include: training and development of high-skilled workforce geared towards big data analysis. The event gave students the opportunity to interact with a number of leading researchers in the area of data engineering and analytics, to present and discuss their research ideas, and to meet colleagues and peers from various regions of the world. ICDE is a top conference in the area of data engineering, and brings together both practitioners and theoretician. As such it offers a very valuable learning environment for students. The career-related events provided an additional opportunity for students to connect with potential mentors and also pursue and consider different career paths. The conference had several inter-disciplinary related papers, related to bioinformatics, social media analysis and geoinformatics. Participants had an opportunity to make an impact beyond their core discipline.
