Collaborative Research: Student Outreach Support Activities at IEEE-CS TCPP Sponsoed Conferences

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A crucial training aspect of graduate students in STEM fields consists of attending and presenting their work at premier scientific conferences. However, students attending technical meetings unaccompanied by their advisors or other mentors often feel isolated and do not fully gain from the experience because many may not know how to effectively navigate a technical conference or network with other researchers. Student-centric programs which are well-integrated with the conferences play a crucial role in providing younger attendees with the tools to take better advantage of their participation at these conferences. Student programs have emerged at several leading conferences, but are still far from being widely adopted. In particular, the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), the flagship research conference sponsored by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP), has a tradition of hosting a PhD forum for many years. This program started as a simple poster presentation and has recently evolved into a comprehensive training workshop that includes sessions on career planning and hands-on tutorials on writing and presentation skills. Moreover, the IPDPS PhD forum provides effective opportunities for student networking. This project seeks to seed similar student programs into the TCPP-sponsored sister conferences of IPDPS that fall under the broad umbrella of parallel and distributed processing, such as Parallel Architecture and Compilation Techniques (PACT) and High Performance Computing (HiPC). In addition, the project seeks to further improve the current student mentorship programs at IPDPS, thereby contributing toward more productive workforce development in the high performance computing disciplines. This proposal will support student programs and student attendance at IPDPS and other sister conferences sponsored by IEEE-CS TCPP. The goal is to cover the whole parallel and distributed processing spectrum by making sure that more specialized conferences also get adequate student support. The beneficiary conferences will be required to host, at the very minimum, an introductory session where students will be enabled to network with peers and mentors. Additionally, conference organizers will be provided with the logistic plan of the PhD Forum at IPDPS and will be encouraged to emulate some of its activities including a student-driven poster session. In this way, students will not only have access to the conference but will also get a more fulfilling and integral experience. To be eligible, the applicant must be enrolled in a degree program at a US-based institution at the time of the conference. The application will include a budget request and justification, gender and minority status, citizenship, and optionally, paper acceptance notice and all the reviews. This project will especially target students that typically would not be able to attend these conferences without financial support, including undergraduate students, graduate students in their first year, and students attending their first conference. In order to increase the diversity of attendees, the project will strongly solicit participation of female and other minority groups.