Student & Minority Faculty Travel Grant Program to Attend ICNP 2007

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The 15th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) and associated events, including a workshop on network protocol security, will be held October 16-19, 2007, in Beijing, China. ICNP has traditionally been a single-track 3-day meeting of around 30 paper presentations. The conference has typically attracted an attendance of about 120-125 international participants. The size of the meeting is often noted by the participants as an advantage-big enough to be worthwhile, but small enough to promote higher-quality interactions among the participants than may be possible at larger conferences like SIGCOMM and INFOCOM. At the same time, ICNP ranks high in citation impact. According to CiteSeer, ICNP ranks second only to SIGCOMM among networking conferences, and ranks in the top 11% of all computer science publication venues in terms of impact. The high impact is a consequence of the consistently high-quality research presented at the conference. This travel grant supports graduate students attending institutions in the United States as well as junior faculty belonging to or serving under-represented groups of computer science researchers. The travel grant program has two components: (1) Outreach to a wider graduate student population; and (2) Outreach to minority faculty or faculty serving minority students (e.g., EPSCOR institutions). About twenty awards to graduate students and ten awards to faculty members will be supported.The objective of the proposal is to widen the audience attending ICNP and, as a result, raise the level of interactions between attendees, and the potential for new collaboration, new investigations, and higher quality research. In addition, this year's conference will be held in China for the first time. By encouraging U.S. participants to attend ICNP 2007, we hope to raise the awareness of U.S.-based researchers of activities taking place in the important China arena, and to foster the understanding and collaboration among the international participants. We believe that support funds by the NSF will be invaluable to enable the attendance of many U.S.-side attendees and to help offset the expenses of foreign travel for these attendees.Broader Impacts. Conference attendance is a crucial part of the life of a researcher. By creating new opportunities for students and faculty-especially those from under-represented groups-to attend a high-quality conference, this project will benefit the research community in several ways. The students and faculty themselves benefit from the opportunity to meet and interact with many other researchers in a favorable setting, and from seeing research presented that may be related to what they are working on, or may inspire them to try a new direction. The research community benefits from the improvement of the students in the pipeline, and the introduction of new researcher perspectives. And everybody benefits from increased diversity of participants attending the conference. The 2007 meeting in Beijing will also bring a unique opportunity for the international participants to learn more about networking research in China.