Conference: Student Support for the International Conference on the Web and Social Media

This conference proposal provides support for scholarships to engage students in the growing domain of computational social science at the International Conference on the Web and Social Media (ICWSM). ICWSM has long served as a critical outlet for research that pairs novel technical contributions with substantive social science research. This work has been central to both the computational and social science communities, such as groundbreaking papers showing biases in the Twitter API and widely-used tools for sentiment analysis. To this end, the conference will contribute to the enhancement and improvement of scientific and engineering activities by continuing to provide an outlet for such work, and a venue to continue to engage in deep, interdisciplinary discussions about the critical role that social media and the web play in American society, both in the past and in the future. The aim of this grant is to help ICWSM contribute to the enhancement and improvement of educational activities by 1) opening access further to students who may otherwise not be able to attend and whose voices might thus otherwise be removed from discussions, and 2) to provide a window into this interdisciplinary area of research and practice for students who are early in their research careers and who might be interested in pursuing a career in academia in the field of computational social science. 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.