Doctoral Student Forum and Student Travel at the 2011 SIAM Data Mining Conference; Phoenix, AZ

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The 2011 SIAM Data Mining (SDM 2011) Conference is being organized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in cooperation with the American Statistical Association. SDM 2011 will be held in Phoenix (AZ), USA from April 28th to April 30, 2011. This conference is the foremost venue for researchers who are addressing problems in data mining to present their work in a peer-reviewed forum. It is widely attended by researchers and practitioners in the field. Funds are sought to provide travel support for approximately 16 Ph.D. students from universities in the United States to attend SDM 2011 and to participate in a Ph.D. student forum that is to be held as part of SDM 2011. Funds are requested to provide travel support for approximately 15 graduate students from universities in the United States to attend SDM 2011. Special efforts will be made to attract candidates who are women or belong to minority groups that are currently under-represented within the data mining research community. Participation in high quality research conferences is an integral component of the training of Ph.D. students in data mining and related fields. The SDM 2011 Ph.D. Student Forum 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 mining. 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. They will interact with peers who share similar interests from other universities, as well as hundreds of leading researchers in data mining from around the world. This experience will be extremely formative and fruitful towards the shaping of their Data mining is playing an increasingly important role in many emerging data-rich sciences and application domains, such as bioinformatics, computational biology, link analysis, counter-terrorism and security. The SDM 2011 Ph.D. student forum will enrich the education and training of student researchers at early stages in their careers. This is especially true for statistics students, since traditionally in statistics, conference publishing is considered less important than it is for instance in computer science. Experiencing and being mentored in this activity has the potential of culture shift, of improving overall communication between statistics and computer science and engineering, in a domain that lies at the boundary between the two. Both the student forum and travel awards will also help broaden the representation of women and members of underrepresented minority groups within the Data Mining research community.