NSF Student Travel Grant for 2019 ACM International Middleware Conference (Middleware)

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This project will provide travel support for US-based graduate students to attend the Middleware 2019 conference and its associated workshops, tutorials and its Doctoral Symposium. This program will expose students to new ideas in emerging areas of distributed systems and middleware and allow them to interact with other students and researchers thereby broadening their intellectual horizons. Middleware brings together participants from both academia and industry, which will help students learn about both career opportunities and realistic challenges faced by industry today. The Middleware conference is particularly beneficial for students to attend not only because of its high-quality technical content, but its commitment to mentoring through a long running doctoral symposium and its strong integration of academic and industrial research. Attending Middleware 2019 will incur an expense beyond the means of typical graduate students due to the cost of airfare, hotels, and conference registration. While many students can receive travel funds from their advisors, this is not always the case, or it may not cover the entire cost. Travel grants are especially important for broadening the participation at conferences by allowing students other than just the first author of accepted papers to attend. This gives more students the opportunity to see research presented first hand and interact with potential mentors and employers. This project will partially support 19 mostly graduate students and in some cases undergraduate students from US-based institutions. Every effort will be made to encourage participation by women and under-represented groups. The disbursement of travel funds will be managed by Vanderbilt University. Every student travel grant awardee will be required to submit a report post conference detailing their experience along with their travel expenses before the funds are disbursed to the awardee. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.