News From ACM-W Scholarships
The ACM-W Scholarship for Attendance of Research Conferences program provides support for women students in Computer Science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. The student does not have to present a paper at the conference to be eligible. Applications are evaluated in 6 occasions each year, in order to distribute awards across a range of conferences, with 1-6 awards given for each group of applications. The ACM-W Scholarships are made possible due to the generous support of Microsoft, Google and Oracle.
If the award is for attendance at one of the ACM special interest group conferences (SIG conferences), the SIG will most likely provide complementary conference registration and a mentor during the conference. The number of free registrations available varies from SIG to SIG.
ACM-W has helped students attend a wide range of meetings including SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI, ICDIPC, Women in Cyber Security, ACM EC, SIGCSE, IEEE Conferences, DIS, IPDPS, ICCC, ACM CHI, AAMAS, FLAIRS, WIMS, CSCW, New Interfaces for Musical Expressions, GECCO, SpringSim, and ICSE amongst others.
The scholarship exposes students to prominent researchers in their field, introduces students to new research, and excites them about doing research themselves. We ask students to share with us some of their thoughts on the conference they attended and we never cease to find truly inspiring stories:
Gizem Sungu, undergraduate student from Marmara University, Turkey, presented on the Genetic Evolutionary Computation Conference, in Madrid, Spain, July, 2015.
“The discussion after the presentation with the researchers was a great opportunity for me to get guidance regarding my future research directions.”
Hannah Leleux, undergraduate student at Lamar University, Texas, USA, attended SIGITE in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my experience in Chicago attending the SIGITE 2015 conference. The conference was very informative and had an amazing keynote speaker.[..] One of the talks I enjoyed was the Computer Forensics talk. The thing I found most interesting about the presenter was that he used hands on activities in his courses. The teacher said he used real cellphones from real criminal cases for testing. He tested the students on cellphones donated from law enforcement.”
Irina Petrova, Master’s student at the optical-computer science university attended GECCO’15 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“GECCO’15 is the biggest and most serious conference which I attended. I have presented a poster “Selection of Auxiliary Objectives in the Travelling Salesman Problem using Reinforcement Learning”. This topic relates to my master thesis. It was great experience for me to present a poster for the first time. I was able to contact a lot of people and talk about my research.”
We offer our congratulations to the first 2016 scholars, awarded scholarships in the latest round of applications!
The next application deadline is February15 for conferences taking place in April and May 2016.