The IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) Young Researcher Forum was established to encourage research students, new Ph.D. graduates and post-doctoral researchers working in the area of scalable network computing systems, to interact and share information that would lead to valuable research contributions. One of its first activities was to organize the First IEEE TCSC Doctoral Symposium for students to obtain feedback on their research topics and advice on initiating a research career. The symposium was held in conjunction with the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid’07) in Rio de Janeiro from May 16, 2007.
The Symposium attracted high-quality submissions which ensured a competitive selection process. Each submission was reviewed by at least two Program Committee members. Based on their reviews, six candidates were invited to present their research proposals at the symposium. During the presentation senior researchers were present whom provided feedback in addition to that given in the program committee reviews. The students received TCSC travel funding to attend the symposium. The coupling of student travel funding to an accepted submission at the Symposium ensured that funding was provided to young researchers actively working in the field. The recipients benefited not only from the Symposium but also from being able to attend the CCGrid conference and network with other researchers.
The Symposium received positive feedback and praise from both the presenting students and the audience. We are looking to organize the second TCSC Doctoral Symposium to be held in conjunction with e-science 2007 (December 10-13, 2007) in Bangalore, India and the third TCSC Doctoral Symposium at CCGrid 2008 in Lyon, France.
