Student Travel Support for the COSN 2013 Conference

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

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.