ACM-W Scholarship for Attendance of Research Conferences program

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 for a scholarship. Applications are evaluated six times each year, to distribute awards across a range of conferences. The ACM Scholarships are made possible nowadays by the generous support of Google and Oracle. The program was started in 2013 by Elaine Weyuker and has been run without any funding interruptions since then.

The scholarship exposes students to prominent researchers in their field, introduces students to new research, and excites them about doing research by themselves. We ask students to share with us some of their thoughts on the conference they attend, preferably with a picture, so that we can show our readers and funders the diversity of our winners. The full collection of previous reports from the students awarded scholarships  can be found now at https://women.acm.org/scholars/acm-w-scholars/. We never cease to find truly inspiring stories!

This month we introduce the two new members of the Scholarship Awards committee. Our previous chairperson Dr Adriana Compagnoni has reduced her activities to be only on an advising capacity to the committee and we’re fortunate to have two new full-time members. As we discussed in the last newsletter, the committee is looking forward to opening the application process to women students working on interdisciplinary environments. Our new members are ideal to help with this task, as both work on multidisciplinary aspects of Computing.

Dr Sara Kalvala (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/sara_kalvala/)  is a reader at the University of Warwick, UK, and her research focuses on Computational Biology and Formal Methods, especially compilers.

Meanwhile Dr Elaine Wah (http://www.elainewah.com/) is currently the Head of Quantitative Research at IEX, the Investors Exchange, Fintech computing. We’re particularly excited about the fact that Elaine was one of our scholars back in 2014.

We also pleased to announce the award granted in the last round of discussions. Silvia Pagliarini, a PhD student at the Computer Science Dept, University of Bordeaux has received a grant to go to Chile, where she’s co-organizing the workshop “SMILES: Sensorimotor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols”, in October 2020. We do need many `smiles’ in these times of pandemic difficulties.

We hope all of you and yours are healthy and well!

The next application deadline is October 15 for conferences taking place December, 1st—January 31st, 2021.   For more information and to apply visit: https://women.acm.org/scholarships/

If you have any questions, please contact the scholarship committee chair Prof. Viviana Bono, bono@di.unito.it


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