The USENIX Association

By Cynthia Deno

Looking for Places to Publish or Funding for Your Student

The USENIX Association is proud to be a member of the Computing Research Association. In joining, we recognized a set of shared values and goals: the strengthening of computing research and of the community engaged in computing research, and the support and promotion of education in the computing fields.

The USENIX Association and its members are dedicated to problem-solving with a practical bias and fostering innovation and research that works. This commitment to innovation and research manifests itself in, among other things: 1) sponsoring venues for communication and exploration of the results of new research and innovation; 2) providing for the publication of new work; 3) supporting the university and college computer science communities from which much new research comes, and 4) fostering professional development and opportunities for participation by students.

USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. Its members are the computer technologists responsible for many of the innovations in computing we enjoy today. USENIX was founded in 1975 by the creators and earliest adopters of UNIX. While we remain the association for UNIX gurus, our members aspire to technical excellence in software and systems within today’s reality of rapidly changing technologies amid vast networks linking a wide variety of computer platforms.

CONFERENCES

While each conference is different, all USENIX conferences offer refereed papers featuring previously unpublished technical information and work-in-progress reports. The USENIX tutorial program is well known for delivering top quality intensive instruction in new and essential, new technologies, which are often presented by the people who led in their development, e.g., Kirk McKusick on BSD internals, John

Osterhout on Tcl and Tk, Tom Christensen on Perl, and Eric Allman on Sendmail.

Presentations are greeted with spirited discussion in an atmosphere of critical thought, freewheeling exchange of ideas and airing of technical issues unfettered by commercialism. USENIX annually sponsors a broad-topic technical conference, a systems administration (LISA) conference, and a variety of smaller conferences, symposia and workshops on such topics as operating systems design and implementation, object-oriented technologies, electronic commerce, domain-specific languages, and systems security. Top echelon researchers and computer scientists in software and systems attend to debate state-of-the-art technical developments. Highly informal, USENIX conferences are fun, thought-provoking and, above all, practical.

USENIX conferences offer researchers the opportunity for timely publication of their results in a highly respected venue. Proceedings of USENIX’s refereed technical programs are published within 6 months of submission, distributed onsite at the conference, then made available to our members on the USENIX website and for purchase by others. Cash prizes are awarded for the overall as well as the best student paper at each conference.

If you are interested in learning more about USENIX’s many conferences, symposia and workshops, please visit our website: http://www.usenix.org. There you will find posted the Calls for Submissions for our upcoming events as they are announced. The Calls give detailed instruction to researchers about submitting their new work for consideration by the Program Committee developing each event.

USENIX and its members value highly the research in the computing systems arena that is generated in colleges and universities. We know computer science faculty members work hard to provide their students with opportunities for technical enrichment, professional development and financial support for their research projects.

Recognizing the importance of this work, USENIX generously funds an array of programs to encourage students’ professional development. "USENIX has always provided a unique environment for students: one in which they can be heard, in which they can learn, and in which they can grow," says Margo Seltzer, USENIX scholastic committee member and professor of computer science at Harvard. "We are enthusiastically looking forward to providing these opportunities to an ever-increasing group of students."

USENIX is proud to offer the following programs for full-time students. Detailed information is available at our website: http://www.usenix.org/students.

Research Grants

Undergraduate Software Projects Grants

Scholarships

Very low student fees for USENIX technical and tutorial programs

Stipends for travel and housing for students at USENIX events

Memberships in USENIX at just $25 affords students the opportunity to participate in the advanced computing community and receive USENIX publications.

USENIX student scholarships typically cover some or all of a student’s expenses including tuition, supplies, and stipend. A generous annual budget provides for funding of student research projects and student software projects; i.e. projects which allow students to perform the software engineering necessary to take an undergraduate course software project to an actual, robust, and portable software package useful to the community. With research grants, we also pre-approve student travel stipends so the student recipients can attend a USENIX conference and present the results of their work. Student contributions to conference programs are encouraged with cash awards for the best paper authored by a student.

Both students and their faculty advisors appreciate our proposal process, for scholarships and research grants, which is known for being common-sensical and free of fuss. "One of the things I love about USENIX is that there’s so little paperwork involved," said Mary Baker, a professor at Stanford University where her student was a recent scholarship recipient. "A scholarship where the student and advisor don’t have to dig up transcripts back to kindergarten, and such, is a special thing in this world."

Another contribution in the area of support for undergraduate education of which we at USENIX are particularly proud is the USENIX Association’s $250,000 endowment to the College Fund (formerly United Negro College Fund). The endowment will fund an annual scholarship to encourage minority students to study computer science. On the day the scholarship was announced USENIX President Andrew Hume expressed the Association’s feelings, "Historically and currently, minorities are under-represented in the technical community that is the core of USENIX’s membership. USENIX is delighted to make a substantial contribution towards increasing minority participation in the field of computer science."

Our conferences and workshops, the publication of refereed papers, and our programs for support of student development and participation are just some of the many ways in which the USENIX Association achieves the mission for which it was founded.