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:
Arooba Javed, Undergraduate student of Computer Science at Wayne State University, went to Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2015, for ASSETS 2015
“The ASSETS 2015 conference was one of the best experiences of my life. The conference started with the inspiring keynote speaker, Jon Schull, who spoke about his company, e-NABLE, which through an online community of volunteers, provides free 3D-printed prosthetic hands and arms to those who need them. Although prosthetic limbs would cost thousands of dollars, the ability to design and 3D print these limbs has made them accessible to many people.[…] My mentor, Erin Brady, was kind enough to introduce me to several of her colleagues.[…] The conference has led me think about career possibilities that I could not have imagined before. I want to thank ACM-W for providing me with the incredible opportunity to attend the ASSETS 2015 conference! It truly was a life changing experience.”
Agnes Salanki fromBudapest University of Technology and Economics, went to Aalborg, Denmark in June 2015.
“The conference program of the useR! 2015 was surprisingly mixed, as among the participants were engineers, computer scientists, statisticians, even researchers in political sciences. […]The highlight of the conference was when I met personally Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, a statistics teacher from Duke University whose Coursera course I finished two years ago. I presented my research related to semi-supervised outlier detection on the poster session [..] After the conference, I gave a talk about my impressions in front of our local experts, the slides can be found here. I am very thankful for your support, it was one of the greatest experiences of my PhD career.”
Congratulations to the new scholars awarded scholarships in the latest voting round in January 2016:
E. Choo, ATidjani, P. Lee, C. Kalra, J. Pena, V. Selvarajah, F. Poursardar, S. Nam and H. Fleenor. We’re expecting more lovely trip reports from you, young ones!