Aikaterini Margatina

My name is Katerina and I just finished by Joint Diploma in Electrical & Computer Engineering in National Technical University of Athens. The last one year and a half, I have been conducting my Diploma Thesis in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. During this process, I was able to publish a paper in the main conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which I believe is the most prestigious conference of our field. All the hard work finally paid off, as I was able to go to Florence and present my work to the community. I just came back to Athens, after 5 full days of conference. It was a life changing event for me, since I got a taste of what I will deal with the next years. I will start my PhD at the University of Sheffield on September 2019. For this reason, attending ACL is an important experience for me. I met a lot of fellow colleagues and professors, I engaged to fruitful conversations, I attended a lot of oral presentations and poster sessions, I learned many new models and trends in our field, and generally I grew both academically and socially. I would like to thank the ACM for giving me this scholarship, because without it I would not be able to attend the conference. I am very happy that these scholarships exist and help all students that are not fully financially secured.