The advisor of one recipient had this to say: "I want to tell you ... how pleased I am with the efforts of ACM-W and ACM to promote and encourage the development of our bright young women in the computing disciplines. ...... is an outstanding example of the potential available to leadership positions in the future from these investments."
My attendance to the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in 2009 was an amazing experience. When I learned that my paper was accepted at NIPS for a poster presentation, I was ecstatic. Until, however, I considered the logistics of how one funds such a conference visit. That's when I discovered that the Association for Computing Machinery had exactly what I needed: funding offered to women in my situation. With the help from ACM-W I was indeed able to attend NIPS, by covering the extensive registration costs for the week-long conference+workshops.
Through this, not only did I have the opportunity of presenting my work from the Max Planck Institute, but also gained exposure to an abundance of high-quality research at one of the best conferences for machine learning. As for the former, I gained experience in the form of a poster presentation at the main conference on the first evening, and in a talk that same morning at the Women and Machine Learning Workshop. These both were were great in obtaining presentation experience of both important varieties (and thereby, confidence in doing so), but also they created the chance to speak with others working on similar problems, and to further brainstorm new ideas, and also through this, to build new connections with potential supervisors. For almost an entire week I was completely submerged in machine learning research and could hear talks first-hand from researchers that, until that point, I had only read their names in text books and papers. Also, with so many researchers gathered in one location, it was convenient to discuss future projects and ideas with my collaborators who are now all unfortunately at quite distant universities. For instance, after attending one poster session, I went directly to one of my collaborators and discussed one poster I found particularly interesting, as they developed a method which I thought would be useful for our problem, and we began the initial implementation right there in the hotel lobby. The combination of information (from the conference events themselves) and locational convenience (being with other researchers in the field) really facilitated a lot of scientific productivity that otherwise would have taken a much longer time-course.
In short, conference attendance is important on many levels for academic (and even personal) development, especially at this stage in my career, and I am very thankful for the ACM-W scholarship in helping me obtain this experience.
I had a wonderful experience at the Ubicomp 2009 conference. There were three highlights on the trip that I wanted to specifically tell you about.
1. The first was that I was able to present a poster during the poster session and I got to meet great people who gave me wonderful feedback and suggestions for my future paper. It was just so good to finally have an opportunity to tell others about my research and to have it so well accepted. I met all kinds of people through the poster session, from undergrads to professors, from industry researchers to owners of start up companies. I even met a reported from the Miami Herald who mentioned my research in the her article which was fun.
I got business cards printed especially for this conference and I was able to give them out to people who were interested, and I have been contacted by several people since then who were interested in my research.
2. At all the meals I tried to sit with someone new and I was able to meet several great people this way. There were several researchers that I knew I wanted to talk to because I am interested in possibly doing internships with them this spring so I also tried to sit with them for one meal too. I was a little anxious, but the experience was much better than I had anticipated. The meals were pretty long and because of that, along with talking about research and business we also had a chance to talk about fun things like hobbies. I had the best conversations with people and many times I really feel like I made a friend rather than just a business acquaintance. It really gave me the chance to see that great researchers are more than just great researchers, they are also real people whom I can connect with on multiple levels.
3. The last day they decided to end the conference a couple hours early. Our hotel was next to the Disney World park so a lot of people decided to go over and go on some rides. I was also able to go and in the lobby I met a couple other researchers who were also interested in going. Maybe it was the magic of Disney, but it turned out that the people I went with were all senior researchers who work on research very similar to what I do. We had a great time and it was such a magical opportunity to meet these people, who I hope to one day have an internship (or even a real job!) with. I mean really, how often do you get to spend time in Disney World with rock star researchers, it was very very cool. That's a pretty memorable way to start a research relationship.
Thank you so much for helping me attend! I hope this wasn't too informal, I just wanted to share with you what an amazing experience I had at Ubicomp this year.
I am very appreciated for ACM-W scholarship supporting for my attending IEEE VisWeek this year.
Although I have attended some conferences during my past four-year PhD programs, I still was excited to participate in IEEE VisWeek conference. First, I was impressed by fast-forward presentations which include preview talk about all the papers. Everyone has one minute to advise his or her paper. It was very interesting, creative, and as well as it gave a completed overview the newest developments in the visualization/information visualization research community. Second, I got useful feedback and ideas from many well-known talented professionals and other graduate students after my presentation. I think that enhancing the applicability and usefulness of my current research into real-world applications will be my important future work. More importantly, I built more confidence and interests to become a good researcher or teacher in the field of computer science after I learned the valuable experience from the discussion during the break of conference sessions. Now, I expect to finish my PhD program in the next summer. The experience of attending this conference is very beneficial to the key point of my life when I am preparing to transfer from a student to be one of real professionals.
Again, I feel so grateful and honored that I had the chance to attend IEEE VisWeek conference supported by ACM-W committees.
ESEC/FSE 2009 is the first international conference I have ever attended. I have never expected attending a conference would bring as much motivation. I can hardly wait to write my next paper. Being in the same room with highly renowned researchers in the Software Engineering (SE) community and having a chance to talk to them made me feel something -- something which is a mixture of excitement, joy, nervousness, and uncertainty. The success stories of Professor Richard Taylor, the keynote address of Professor Mary Shaw, and the presentations about a number of interesting research projects made me question myself -- what does it take to be the future Mary Shaw?
In ESEC/FSE, I met my potential future colleagues, people who speak the same SE language as I do. It is fascinating to see many people trying to solve similar problem but yet come up with different solution. Even though the industry presence was lower than my expectation, it was good to hear what industry guys have to say about researches that are conducted in universities.
Since I came back from the conference, I have a different perspective on how to approach my research problem. After looking at other people's methodology, I devised a mechanism that best suits me. Since my paper was accepted as a short paper, I studied what my paper lacks by comparing my work with others. Next time, I want to come here or to other similar conferences as a full paper presenter.
It has been a good opportunity to hear the experiences and viewpoints of the pioneers of the "Information Retrieval" overall picture and now feel at ease to position my work at the right place. I shared my research perspective with one of the senior scientists and got valuable feedback about my ideas.
I also got the knowledge of the key conferences in the field, their paper acceptance criteria, and the rules of publishing. From a keynote speaker’s experience, I learned once more that if you have a creative idea and you're sure that it's worth publishing you should not give up even if you get some rejections. You must keep your self-confidence.
Additionally, I met a lot of researchers [from] all over the world, made good acquaintances. I returned back from the event with full of energy, encouragement, new knowledge, and good memories.
First, I would like to thank ACM's Committee on Woman in Computing who sponsors me to attend the GECCO 2009. This is 11th in the rankings of 701 international conferences in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and human-computer interaction. I was very happy to have a paper which was accepted as full paper....
When I was at the GECCO, I attended some of sessions concern to my research field. At session that I had presentation, there were three papers which solved the same problem with the one in my research -- Bounded Diameter Minimum Spanning Tree Problem -- but in different approaches. We had time to discuss each other. I met Prof. Gunther Raidl and Prof. Bryant Julstrom who have several papers concern to my research, and I got some good advices from them. These contribution were very helpful for my research.
I also met and discuss with some students from Canada, Argentina, Korea... about research directions and also the life.
I was interested in the tutorials of Franz Rothlaut (Representations for Evolutionary Algorithms), Kenneth De Jong (Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach), Rajeev Kumar (Evolutionary Multiobjective Combinatorial Optimization), John Holland (Genetic Algorithm: Past and Future)
I hope I will have opportunities to attend the other conferences in future to get more experience and exchange research of interest with other groups.
I would like to express my strong gratitude to ACM-W for sponsoring partially my attendance to IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'09). Attending ISCC had allowed me to present my research work and enabled me to interact with peer students and faculty whose reserach interest align to mine. In addition, the talks at the conference provided a great source of learning about different reseach issues in the broad area of computer communications/networking field. I believe that interaction engaged at the conference help me to put my future contributions into proper perspective within the community.
I would like to first thank you for giving female students the opportunity to attend research conferences by offering the ACM-W scholarship.
One of the primary reasons that I wanted to attend ECIR was that I wanted to present a paper that I was co-authoring and it was a great opportunity to meet with people working in my research field. Attending this conference helped me in several ways. First, there were a couple of papers at ECIR authored by professors and researchers from the institutes that I have applied for research positions. I had the opportunity to interact faceto- face with other researchers and convey my skills and the enthusiasm that I have about my research in ways that is not possible through offline communication. Thus, attending the conference gave me the opportunity to personally meet with those faculty and researchers and helped me build academic and industrial ties as I start to establish my research career. Additionally, attending the conference gave me further insights into the hot research topics and related fields, helped me shape my future research directions, and presented opportunities for future collaboration with other researchers. Moreover, attending the conference had a direct impact on my research work as well. Throughout my doctoral and post-doctoral studies, I have been mainly developing and implementing algorithms for performance and functionality improvements to CiteSeer, which is a well known scientific digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. One main area that needed further improvements was the ranking of the search results of academic papers, and we needed to design a ranking function that effectively utilizes the interplay between the papers' topicality, recency, authors' social networks and the citation graph. The conference had special emphasis on novel ranking methodologies for Information Retrieval, and I had the opportunity to have fruitful discussions regarding the ways to improve our models for ranking scientific literature. After the conference, I shared the thoughts and ideas with my colleagues in the lab and we designed and developed a new ranking algorithm, which worked better for CiteSeer. Finally, I have also been invited to give talks in two different universities, one in US and the other in Turkey. I am very much excited about these opportunities since giving talks as an invited speaker will certainly increase the exposure of my work and will enable me to introduce myself and my research to a wider audience.
I was also one of the winners of the Google travel grant that is awarded to only two female computer science students at this conference. The prize included a free registration for the conference and 300 Euros for the travel expenses. Google cash award certainly helped me in planning my trip to the conference but it was not enough to cover the whole travel expenses. ACM-W scholarship made it possible for me to attend the conference.
I was really excited to know that IJCAI took place in Pasadena, CA, this year since I am within driving distance (about an hour). I was even more excited when I received the ACM-W scholarship. As a student who will receive her Master's degree and start her PhD program in the Fall semester, I am very happy to have the opportunity to be exposed to a variety of topics in AI, especially on the multiagent system, computer vision, and machine learning in general.
The tutorials and the technical programs were informative; however, it is clear that I will need more knowledge in each subject area to fully appreciate the presented research. I enjoyed all the invited speakers from various companies and institutions as they gave a more applied research perspective. Besides the technical program, I also went to social events where I got to talk to other students and researchers. It was inspiring to see the passion when they talked about AI and their work. The experience made me want to be part of the community.
Over all, I was very glad to have the opportunity to attend an AI conference, especially right before starting my PhD program. I want to thank ACM-W for the scholarship that made the wonderful experience possible. I look forward in starting my PhD program and contributing to the AI community.
The International Conference on Logic Programming is one of the major annual events in my field of research. It usually includes several workshops and a Doctoral Consortium. This year, I was accepted to present the topic of my dissertation in the Doctoral Consortium. This was a great opportunity for me, as it was my first presentation in a conference as a PhD student. I was happy to see the reactions of the public to my presentation and to receive feed-back from the audience. I now have the impression that my dissertation is going in a good direction and that it matches the current research trends in my field. This is important if I want my work to be meaningful for the research community in logic programming. My participation in the Doctoral Consortium gave me stronger motivation to pursue my research goals and to participate actively in the future in conferences and other events. Another aspect of this international conference that I enjoyed very much was the fact that it gathered the best researchers in logic programming from all over the world. Their presentations were very informative to me and I think I learned a lot from them. Besides the informative aspect, it was also very exciting for me to have the opportunity to meet people that I admire and whose papers I had read. I also enjoyed meeting current PhD students that might be my colleagues one day and sharing my impressions about the graduate studentÕs life with them. I want to deeply thank ACM-W for giving me this wonderful opportunity! Thank you!
This year, I was fortunate enough to have a paper accepted for oral presentation at the 14th Annual CyberTherapy and CyberPsychology conference that was held in the beautiful town of Lago Maggoire, Italy (near Milan). The goal of the conference was to bring together researchers from the scientific community who focus on areas as diverse as clinical therapy, rehabilitation, cognitive science, computer science, and the social sciences to discuss advancements in the growing fields of cybertherapy and cyberpsychology.
At the conference, I was able to attend a number of workshops and paper presentations that were given by some of the most influential people in the areas of rehabilitation, virtual reality, and psychology. Being able to listen to individuals such as Albert `Skip' Rizzo, Giuseppe Riva, and Tamar Weiss, allowed me to see how `the best of the best' present their research and discuss their ideas with others. The presentations I sat in on also gave me a number of ideas for sub-problems that I may want to tackle during my PhD studies.
The conference also had numerous networking opportunities during break times and lunches. This valuable one-on-one time allowed me to put faces to the various names, papers, paradigms, and technologies that I had read about or used during my Master's degree. As most of the conference attendees share my passions for technology, virtual reality, and psychology, it was very inspirational and motivating for me to be able to talk with people that have the same goals and interests as I do.
On the third day of the conference, I gave my oral presentation. I believe that my presentation went over very well. I received a lot of valuable feedback, comments, and critiques from those that were present. Presenting my work to such a knowledgeable audience gave me a lot of confidence, helped me practice my presentation skills, and illustrated the importance of research result dissemination, discussion, and critiques to me.
Because the conference was held in Italy, I not only had an enriching academic experience, but also an extremely rewarding cultural and personal experience. Getting to have exquisite Italian cuisine and eating in breathtaking settings that I had only dreamed about in the movies, were only two of the highlights of my trip. Having the opportunity to be immersed in the Italian language, culture, and historic landmarks made my conference experience that much more exciting and memorable. I am so very grateful to the ACM-W for providing me with financial support so that I could attend this conference, network with people in the fields of therapy and rehabilitation, and have an awesome time in one of the most beautiful countries!
On the first day we met all of the DC people and had fun playing crazy golf in the cold and then rain. The great thing about social events is that the socializing usually surrounds great discussions about everyone's research. But even before I arrived here, the thoroughness with which the reviewers gave feedback helped my dissertation tremendously. The reviews helped me think through some methodological issues that I've been wrestling with and in revising the DC paper, I rewrote some key sections that are better now. The DC was great. I enjoyed seeing other students in different stages with vastly different approaches and goals to their research. But somehow because we share one domain, one context, all seemed applicable on at least one level to my research and some on several.
I presented my full paper in a session that included two other research papers in a similar area-usability and open source software. In fact the papers investigated similar issues but from different perspectives so that each of the studies validated one another. I have established several possible collaborative partnerships. Of course the other sessions are very interesting when people present such a diversity of topics but also talking to people is informative and a lot of fun. So talking more about my research and hearing about others' work and how it may connect to mine is really beneficial. Because the context (open source software) is the same, it is fairly easy to find some cross-over with other people's work because we learn more about the open source environment and it most likely helps our own research.
Aending EACL 2009 was a great experience both academically and personally for me. It was a great pleasure to discuss about up-to-date technology about Natural Language Processing with other great researchers. I can feel their passion about NLP and endless curiosity about new technology.
I posted my research about evaluating the sentence quality using syntactic features. The title of the paper was "Predicting the fluency of text with shallow structural features: case studies of machine translation and human-written text". I got lots of questions in the poster session and some advices of other researches about the experiment were very interesting.
In addition, personally it was the first experience that I attend the international conference and also my first time in Europe. I enjoyed the time in Greece.
After the conference, I got the opportunity to submit a chapter based on my EACL paper for the Springer book about Natural language generation. Thanks for all experience and opportunity that I can get from this scholarship!
At the ACM Sig CHI 2009 Conference, I attended several thought-provoking research presentations and panels, engaged in discussions and special interest group meetings on various topics in HCI research, and participated in social activities. The ACM Sig CHI conference brings together HCI researchers, designers, engineers and practitioners all in a single conference, and the interdisciplinary audience is exciting and unique.
The most rewarding opportunity at the conference was the chance to present my research in the ACM CHI Student Research Competition. It was great to speak with the panel of judges and get their feedback on my work. I also participated in a useful workshop, "Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare" about evaluating novel technologies in health care settings, a topic directly related to my research. I met several other Ph.D. students and researchers in both academia and industry, and talked with them about their career paths. I also attended valuable panel discussions on non-research-related topics in Human-Computer Interaction.
I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss my research with others, and hear about their work and backgrounds. I met with research mentors from different institutions and reconnected with several other colleagues whom I don't often have a chance to see. Because I was a volunteer for the conference, I also got a taste of the organizational side of conference planning. I helped to contribute to just a few of the many pieces that must come together to hold an event like this!
Thanks again ACM-W for the great experience!
Thanks to the grant, I was able to present my paper in the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 2008. The presentation was well received. I got very interesting questions that inspired me about the future plans to further expand the work. For example, one of the questions was about how our system handles view dynamics, which was not particularly addressed in the paper presented. This turned out to be an important research question for the next step of our research. Several attendees were very interested in our tele-immersive project, and came to discuss with me after the talk, and I was able to show some video demos to them. This certainly increases the visibility of our work, and may open new doors to following research or future collaboration. During the conference, I also attended other sessions of presentations, and got to know the latest problems this community has been exploring. The conference was also an excellent opportunity for networking, which allowed me to connect with several professors and PhD students in other institutions.
Attending CHI met, if not exceeded, my expectations. It was incredible getting to see the "celebrities" of HCI like Hiroshi Ishii and Wendy Kellogg. The talks were not only informative, but they were also inspiring and entertaining. I think I had more new ideas for projects and research in those five days, than I have ever had. It was an atmosphere that bred creativity and innovation. I hope to take some of those ideas with me next year as I go on to graduate school.
While I expected the intellectual atmosphere, I was pleasantly surprised by the social one. Networking was a major part of my experience at CHI. I got a chance to talk to graduate students not just about their presentations, but about what I can expect in the first year of a Ph.D. program. Everyone, from students to professors, was approachable and friendly. Going to the conference alone was not scary; in fact, I think it helped me make more friends and contacts.
Overall, it was an amazing experience from the presentations and papers to the receptions and coffee breaks. Everything was made possible by ACM-W. Thank you!
Attending the Hawaii International Confererence on System Sciences was a great experience for many reasons. Being a truly international conference with 40 countries represented, it was a great venue for me to meet other scholars from around the world. Since the conference is a very diverse one in terms of topics and tracks, I had opportunities to meet people who are doing research in fields and application areas very different from mine. Meeting and interacting with other researchers in the same application area was also very helpful. It was fascinating to see how the same application area was being investigated by social science researchers as well as engineering researchers, and to see how my work might fit into, and advance, the research area as a whole. I saw, for the first time, how a group of people working on problems in the same topic area truly come together as a community by sharing their work with each other, collaborating on projects and publications, and organizing events such as this one to facilitate dissemination and advancement of new knowledge.
I also had the opportunity to present my group's research in one of the application area tracks. In addition to gaining experience presenting ideas and results to a different audience than I am accustomed to, I was affirmed when I received questions from the audience that were very closely aligned with the questions and challenges that I and my group are trying to work through right now. I was also enlightened and encouraged when I received comments that revealed different thoughts and angles on the problem that we hadn't yet considered. I can see how the sharing that takes place through the conference structure is important for finding new angles and insights into research challenges.
This year, I attended my first SIGCHI conference in Boston. Having recently decided to go to graduate school in Human-Computer Interaction and currently attending Wellesley College, a 30-minute drive from Boston, this was a great opportunity to not only network with the professionals in the industry and academia, but also to see the best of current research in the field. I was able to meet some of the faculty members and graduate students I will be working with at Carnegie Mellon and talk to them about their research and mine. Talking with graduate students during their poster sessions allowed me to see what graduate-level research was like, and to get ideas for my projects. Many of the talks I went to were very interesting and inspiring, and it was great to meet several researchers whose work I had only heard about before.
Computer Science is a relatively small major at Wellesley College. I can now share my experiences at CHI with other students in computing majors and encourage them in their own academic career. More specifically, I hope to bring more Human-Computer Interaction awareness to students in computing majors here and encourage them to think interdisciplinary while working on their own projects. As for myself, I am even more excited about entering the field of HCI, and look forward to graduate school this fall.
Thank you for this opportunity!
The 2009 HRI conference was a wonderful experience and I was very glad to be able to attend. This year's theme, "Interacting Naturally with Robots", was concerned with the importance of people being able to interact with robots in a way similar to how they interact with humans. This theme was seen in a number of interesting papers and posters presented on non-verbal interaction methods, such as gaze, facial expression, body gesture, and touch. These methods were discussed from both a recognition perspective (what is the human doing) as well as a generation perspective (how can the robot communicate to the human what it is doing).
At the conference I also had the opportunity to participate in the HRI Pioneers Workshop, which is a forum for young researchers to get together to present their work, share ideas, as well as discuss important issues in the field. The workshop was really enjoyable - I was able to receive helpful feedback on my work, meet a lot of other researchers, and was challenged to consider tackling some big problems in our field in a fun and interesting way.
I am very thankful to ACM-W for their support in helping me attend this conference.
The conference had been so useful for my scientific research. Especially in the conference, I could have a chance to be able to follow the recent news on the method that I have been studying. ..... there was a paper that I know before in the conference about KNN. I had been studying this paper before I attended the conference. I had a chance to listen to it and ask some question about it. I asked for the code of their program to apply it for my research.
Especially, plenary session had been really good for me. They summarized the result of the latest works that have been analyzed recently and mentioned some important methods which are used for many pattern recognition applications.
Nevertheless, I learned that a new technology named as CUDA, which is different than the classical parallel architectures, is extensively used to accelerate softwares. In my future studies, I might need to use it, if my program would be too slow.
As a result, there are lots of things that I've learned for my research in the conference. Thank you again to all of you for funding me to attend this conference.
For the security community, the ACM CCS is a first tier conference involving a tight circle of professionals. As a first year PhD student, having a paper accepted at one of CCS's workshops was for me a great opportunity and reward to attend both events. The experience was worth every minute: I had the chance to discuss my work in DRM systems with a group of excellent researchers from academia and industry, I made some friends with whom I will collaborate in the near future, and I learnt a great deal about how to present my work to a high-end audience.
Attending CCS was more than an eye-opening experience. In my university, the group of people engaged in security research is reduced in number, and our interests are quite spread. Throughout the seminars that I gave and attended in my university, I was frequently defending security as 'another aspect' for people with a broad rather than in-depth knowledge related to my area. CCS, on the other hand, gathered top security people in one place, and this offered me the chance to go in depth when discussing my work and theirs. Along with studying cutting-edge approaches in security, I caught a glimpse of the great enthusiasm of the leaders of this field, and now I feel so grateful and honored that I had the chance to share my passion for computer security and technology with them.
I am determined to be part of CCS next year! I thank you for this opportunity and I hope the ACM-W initiative will support other women in research as well.
Also, the conference provided me the opportunity to establish contacts with recognized scientists and professionals that not only encouraged me to complete my PhD but who also showed interest in my curriculum. I noticed that the participation of women in this congress was a minority, but I hope that through organizations such as ACM-W more and more women may be encouraged to take leading roles in the scientific community.
I am deeply thankful to ACM-W for supporting my participation at this conference.
Throughout the week, poster presenters were required to stand next to their posters and answer any questions conference attendees might have about their work. Many people came up to me and asked about my project. All of them were very impressed with my work; in fact, I might collaborate with some of them in the future.
I am so glad I was able to attend the Siggraph conference this year and get my work out there for people to see. Thanks again for the scholarship.
I gained so much from attending this conference. I was able to begin networking with some of the leading professionals in the field, as well as hone my presentation and communication skills in a professional and scientific setting. It was a great experience being with so many talented professionals, as well as to see and learn in more depth about the other new developments in the field and related areas. I conversed with other graduate students and socialized with some of the best professionals in the field of computer forensics. Attending this conference and participating as a presenter helped me to see my own potential as a researcher, scientist and leader.
Thank you for making it possible for me to attend.
Attending the conference has motivated me to continue pursuing research work. Attending talks and listening to keynote speakers who were excited about the things they were doing made me feel excited as well, knowing that I too can be a part of the ongoing studies of computer science. Hearing about pertinent topics in the field first-hand brought them to life; whereas I have read numerous articles and abstracts about research topics, they do not convey the same passion that the researchers themselves do in person. I would love to become engrossed in a project that fascinates me and make my own contributions to the field, and to share these contributions at future conferences .
The conference provided many opportunities for networking and meeting new as well as familiar colleagues in the field. I was able to converse with people in academia, industry, research and even government researchers....What I found most helpful was the sharing of ideas and thoughts regarding the current challenges and what open problems exist in Bioinformatics. ... As a doctoral student in the midst of refining my dissertation topic, attending this conference at this time in my academic career gave me the opportunity to talk with leaders and up-and-coming researchers in the field about what they feel are much needed areas for continue research.... I am very appreciative of the opportunity given to me by my department and ACM-W to attend this conference.
I am grateful to have been able to attend this year's ISSRE and the co-located A-MOST. ISSRE brought together people from academia, industry, and government to discuss an array of topics, including testing, metrics, security and risk assessment. A-MOST focused on a single way to insure reliability - model-based testing - which is the approach I plan to use in my dissertation. I had the pleasure of presenting my recent work on test coverage at ISSRE's Fast Abstracts session, a forum where researchers can talk about ongoing, unpolished work and get feedback on how to proceed.
One lesson that ISSRE/A-MOST hammered into me was that the simulated world in which researchers conduct experiments differs greatly from the actual world. For example, in the research world a testing process should satisfy at least 100-percent statement coverage....In practice, testers usually cover at most 80 percent of statements; imperfect software is acceptable....
One of the interesting debates at ISSRE/A-MOST was "What do we mean by 'software model'?" During A-MOST's panel discussion, I asked - expecting a definitive answer - what exactly sets model-based testing apart from other kinds of testing. Rather than a pat answer, I got a thoughtful discussion, in which several of the panel and audience noted that all testing is model-based in some sense of the work "model". .....
As you can see, ISSRE/A-MOST taught me a lot about my research area. I hope that ACM-W will continue to support students' conference travel through scholarships in the future.
Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (OURCS) was a Conference held in October 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, aimed at undergraduate women studying Computer Science considering taking up research as a career in the future. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Research and organized by Women@SCS, a group of women students and faculty of the School of Computer Science, CMU. Some of the keynote speakers included this year's Turing Award winner, Fran Allen, Jennifer Tour Chayes from Microsoft Research and Jeanette Wing, former Head of the Computer Science Department at CMU.
The most exciting parts of the conference were the research workshops, which gave all the participants a chance to work with researchers from Microsoft Research and CMU on problems in robotics, human-computer interaction, experimental math etc. over the three days. My group worked on 'Exploring Online Credibility', in which we addressed the problem of determining the credibility of Wikipedia articles, designed algorithms to calculate it and also designed the front end of a system that could actually be used by Wikipedia.
Listening to Fran Allen speak and share her experiences as a woman in the early days of Computer Science was the highlight of the entire trip for me. This was the first time I had been outside my country, India, and it was a very memorable experience.
The ACM-W scholarship allowed me to travel to Montreal, where I had the opportunity of presenting a poster at the Precarn Intelligent Systems (IS) 2007 conference. I was also able to attend 3 other conferences, which were co-located in Montreal. As a poster presenter, I shared my experiences in developing and testing my intelligent wheelchair in various environments. Several researchers gave me valuable feedback and offered new ideas, which I am currently pursuing. Presenting at the conference helped me enhance my presentation skills and refine my research objectives. The poster session, awards banquet and workshops also provided me with opportunities to network with professors and other graduate students.
The joint conference exposed me to current research in the areas of AI, graphics, robotics, vision & intelligent systems. The technical sessions were very educational and exposed me to novel techniques. I was able to see several examples of real-life applications of artificial intelligence in the demo session. Such applications often pose a wide variety of research and deployment challenges. Through the conference, I learnt about the challenges researchers have been faced with, ways to overcome these challenges, and issues that are yet to be resolved. I continue to be in touch with some of the researchers I met at the conference, and hope to collaborate with them in the near future!
It was a great opportunity to present the paper entitled "Data Hiding in H.264 Encoded Video Sequences" coauthored by Spyridon Kapotas, Eleni Varsaki, Athanassios Skodras. The presentation took place on a poster session, where remarkable papers on Watermarking and Data Hiding were presented. I had the chance to discuss with researchers from all over the world working on the same area with us and to hear all about signal processing news evolution. Nevertheless I proved great emotions when well known researchers approached our stand, took a good look at our poster and looked excited from our work. It is truly a success to see that our work is recognized by other researchers.
The poster session was the last day of the conference so in the meantime I had the opportunity to discuss with great researchers in the field. The conference topics were very interesting, as multimedia sessions had taken place. Invited talks of great researchers were very challenging, ..... such as multimedia Technologies for Children, Musical Sound Synthesis, Ambient Intelligence and Augmented Reality.
Concluding I would like to add that I found my attendance to such a ..... conference very positive.
Attending SIGGRAPH was an enriching experience for me in terms of gaining practical knowledge, learning about projects on the cutting edge of the graphics field, and gaining insight into what it might be like to perform research in graduate school and beyond. SIGGRAPH inspired me to continue the pursuit of my goal of being admitted to a PhD program. Attending the paper presentations made me aware not only of the topics on the cutting edge of graphics, but also of which institutions are leading in the graphics field, and the focus of those institutions. For example, many of the paper presentations at SIGGRAPH that I attended and found to be especially interesting were co-authored by researchers from Berkeley; I found the presentation of "Interactive Cutaway Illustrations of Complex 3D Models," a work co-authored by Maneesh Agrawala, extremely interesting. "Multiscale Shape and Detail Enhancement from Multi Light Image Collections," also co-authored by Professor Agrawala of Berkeley, was fascinating. Finally, I gained many invaluable opportunities to discuss the field of graphics, as well as graduate school opportunities, with my own UVA professors and with UVA graduate students that I might not have had outside of the conference setting.
I am very pleased that I managed to attend the EuroMicro conference to present my undergraduate work on a new class of cellular automata. One of the main things that caught my eyes was the number of women attending the conference; they were very few women there and even fewer female students. There were so ... few female students that I was asked a couple of times if I was a new faculty member! I got a little intimidated at the beginning by this fact; however, I managed to do a decent job in presenting my work. At the beginning of my presentation I was nervous, but when I got going, I felt more confident and by the end of the talk I was very confident in answering the questions I got from the audience. Based on the comments I got from the conference, I am now very confident that I can get my work published as a journal paper very soon.
It was my first attendance in an international conference; it was also my first time in Europe. I found it quite interesting to see different people with different cultures and different view points on different subjects.
Thank you again for helping me attend this conference.
I feel that my time at VRST this year was overall well-spent. The most beneficial part of the conference for me was presenting my poster. It was rewarding to see people take enough interest in my work to come and ask me questions about it as well as offer recommendations on how I could improve my application. Even though I had been practicing with other visitors in our lab, talking with people who were less familiar with my project helped me learn to speak confidently and clearly about my work and to thoughtfully accept questions and criticism about it. Equally important in the poster presentation was the opportunity it gave me to meet people. Between the poster presentation and the various tasks I was responsible for as a student volunteer, I spoke with most of the people who attended. I became friends with several other students and learned a lot from talking with them about their schools and areas of interest. I met a lot of professors as well as some professionals in industry, and conversations with them helped me pair familiar names with their faces, and gave me more insight into their work.
Also valuable to me were the presentations I got to attend. My favorite sessions were the ones on crowds, avatars, education, and entertainment. I enjoy listening to the different approaches people have taken to problems, especially those that affect the work I do. I love seeing how much creativity and innovation others bring to their work, and the wide variety of applications that are currently being developed in virtual reality. I look forward to spending more time with the proceedings and reading in closer detail about the presentations I attended.