This grant supports participation of approximately 12-15 graduate students from US institutions in the first instance of the Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN) of the Association for Computing Machinery, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 7-8, 2013. Participation in conferences such as COSN is an extremely important part of the graduate school experience, provides students with an opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and exposes them to leading edge research in the field. Attendance at the inaugural COSN event is especially important as it will be the first unified meeting of core members of the research community, the result of merger of six different workshops held over the last few years that were co-located with a diverse set of conferences.
This project integrates research and education of students through exposure to a premier technical meeting in online social networks. Students will have the opportunity to observe high-quality presentations and interact with senior researchers in the field. The proposed student participation is expected to have a positive impact on the students' research interests. The project will promote diversity by encouraging and enabling women and other under-represented minorities to participate. Furthermore, the truly international flavor of COSN as an annual conference is reflected in the composition of the Technical Program Committee as well as the expected set of authors of papers. As such, it cultivates international research interactions and presents a tremendous opportunity to students.
With well over a billion people as members, today's online social networks (OSN) pervade all aspects of our daily lives. OSNs have grown beyond platforms for social communication and news dissemination, to indispensable tools for professional networking, social recommendations, and online content curation. Their usage has influenced today's societal and cultural issues, and changed the way we see ourselves and communicate with each other. Not surprisingly, study and research in OSNs is highly interdisciplinary, and participants include researchers from networking and systems, databases and data mining, security and privacy, and modeling and analysis. For a number of years, researchers have published in disparate venues focused in their own areas, and have lacked a common platform to congregate and exchange ideas. This has limited communication between like-minded researchers, and led to repeated and sometimes conflicting results across disjoint venues. This grant from the National Science Foundation supported travel grants for students to attend the ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN 2013), which was held in Boston, Massachusetts in October 2013. COSN provided a premier publication venue that features high quality research from academia and industry across multiple disciplines focused around the study of OSNs. The grant helped support 15 student attendees from a variety of institutions, and covered all or part of their valid travel expenses, including airfare, hotel rooms (shared with other students), and other travel expenses. The COSN conference provided a highly selective technical program, with 22 accepted short and long papers out of a total of 138 submissions (an acceptance rate of 15.9%).
