Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2024 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)

This proposal seeks to partially fund travel costs for about 16 student participants to the 2024 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in December 2024. ACSAC, currently celebrating its 40th year, is a top-tier academic security conference that averages about 250-300 highly skilled security professional and student attendees per year.

It includes attendees from academia, government, and industry to facilitate idea exchange around pressing problems in applied computer security; this year's focal topic theme is around security applications of generative AI-based systems. Supporting travel for students who do not otherwise have funding will broaden both the base of participants and ideas available at the conference, which will advance both the students' professional development and the field as a whole.

Students will expand their education by gaining valuable insight into peer-reviewed research, sharing their own work through conference papers, work-in-progress talks, and/or posters, learning from leading experts and practitioners, and participating in workshops and in-depth training on emerging topics. Criteria for selecting students for travel funding include having work to present at the conference, broader connection to the security community, financial need, and creating a diverse set of institutions, topics, and students supported by the funding.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.