Travel Grants Program

Travel grants are provided through a joint effort of the Computer Science Graduate Student Board and the Department of Computer Science. They are intended to provide partial support for graduate students presenting their research at high-quality conferences when their academic advisor is unable to provide funding. Grants usually amount to $500, which can only be used for transportation, hotel, and conference admission. There is a limit of one grant per paper. The program is currently sponsored through the Corporate partners program of the Department of Computer Science.

This program is intended for students who are unable to obtain funding through other means. It is expected that students pursue all available funding opportunities and are able to document the sources tried. These sources, for example, include:

1. Purdue Graduate Student Government (PGSG) offers travel grants each semester.
2. A number of conferences offer student travel grants and give preference to authors of accepted papers.
3. For security-related research, Center for Education in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) offers student travel support.
4. The Women in Science Program (WISP) and AGEP initiative offer student travel support.
5. Fellowships might have funds for student travel.

1. The work must have been performed while a member of the Department of Computer Science.
2. The student must be the presenter of the paper.
3. The student must be a degree seeking graduate student in the Department of Computer Science.
4. The student's academic advisor must not have funds to support the travel (confirmed by the CS Business Office).
5. It must be the case that no other student from the Department of Computer Science is funded to go to the conference because of the same paper.

The number of the grants issued depends on the availability of the funds. The evaluation process is based on the following (and possibly other) criteria:

• Quality of the conference
• Quality of the paper
• Conference acceptance rate
• Student's record

Note: There is no consideration of domestic versus international conferences.

All applications will be evaluated by a committee consisting of three students and three faculty members. The faculty advisor of the GSB is the chair of the evaluation committee. The committee's decision will be passed to the Department Head for final approval.

Each applicant needs to submit the following items:

1. Completed Application Form
2. Call for participation for the conference that includes the members of the program committee
3. Acceptance letter from the program chair with paper reviews
4. The paper itself
5. Applicant's vita or resume

Submission: Please e-mail all materials (in PDF format) to the GSB Chair (see officers page). If you cannot e-mail all the materials, please e-mail the GSB chair for other arrangements.

As of Summer 2007, this program has an open-deadline. However, applications should be received within two weeks of the paper's acceptance and before the actual travel.

You should be contacted within 3 days of submission by the GSB Chair confirming the receipt of the application. If not, please contact (him/her) via e-mail.

The applications should be evaluated during a period of about two weeks to four weeks, and all applicants will be notified at the end of that period. However, depending on the time of year or scheduling conflicts, the evaluation of an application may take longer.

• Barry Wittman
  • Paper Title: Approximation Algorithms for the Traveling Repairman and Speeding Deliveryman Problems with Unit-Time Windows
  • Conference: 10th Intl. Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX 2007)

• Fijoy Vadakkumpadan
  • Paper Title: EMBRIOSS: Electromagnetic Brain Imaging by Optimization in Spectral Space
  • Conference: IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro (ISBI 2007)

• Qiqi “Denny” Wong
  • Paper Title: GPU-Based Visualization Techniques for 3D Microscopic Imaging Data
  • Paper Title: GICEB: Automatic Segmentation Algorithm for Biomedical Images
  • Conference: Computational Imaging Symposium of SPIE and IS&T Electronic Imaging Conference

• Maleq Khan
  • Paper Title: A Fast Distributed Approximation Algorithm for Minimum Spanning Trees
  • Conference: 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2006)

• Fijoy Vadakkumpadan
  • Paper Title: POSS: Efficient Non-linear Optimization for Parameterization Methods
  • Conference: Vision Geometry XIV, SPIE and IS&T Electronic Imaging

• Jorge Ramos
  • Paper Title: Feature-Based Generators for Time Series Data
  • Conference: Winter Simulation Conference