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 cycles each year in order to distribute awards across a range of conferences, with 1-6 awards given for each group of applications. The 2014-2015 ACM-W Scholarships are made possible due to the generous support of Google and Oracle.

This year was my first time serving on the committee in the role of Proceedings Chair. Receiving the scholarship to attend helped me to network with the other committee members including top researchers in the field of HCI in Korea, whom I otherwise would never have the opportunity to meet. I was able to meet with next year’s Proceedings chairs to pass on knowledge gained from serving in that role to help them improve the conference printed program for next year.[..] I also had the opportunity to meet with individuals on my dissertation committee who are external members.” says Deana Brown, from Georgia Tech, who went to Seoul, Korea, for CHI in April 2015.

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 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, DIS, IPDPS, ICCC, ACM CHI, AAMAS, FLAIRS, RO-MAN, WIMS, CSCW, New Interfaces for Musical Expressions, GECCO, SpringSim, and ICSE amongst others.

The scholarships expose students to prominent researchers in their field, introduce students to new research, and excite 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:

Educational Data Mining is a growing multidisciplinary field of research, and there is almost no faculty member who works on this domain at my home university.[..]. My research is about a virtual learning environment (TeachLivE) for novice teachers. At the conference, I discussed several challenges about my research with different people, and they patiently helped me to resolve most of them.” says Leila (Roghayeh) Barmaki, from University of Central Florida, who went to London for the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining.
After receiving the news that I was awarded this scholarship, I decided to present a poster in the Career Workshop for Women and Minorities in Computer Architecture (CWWMCA) to make the most of the experience”, says Luna Backes, from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) who went to Cambridge, UK for 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture in December 2014.

The next application deadline is October 15 for conferences taking place in December and January.For more information and to apply visit: women.acm.org/scholarship.  If you have any questions, contact scholarship committee chair Prof. Adriana Compagnoni, Adriana.Compagnoni@stevens.edu

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