Travel: Student Travel Grant for Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) 2024

This award supports student travel for selected participants of the Doctoral Consortium (DC) program at the Seventeenth Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2024), scheduled to take place in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, from June 6 to 8, 2024. SoCS is a well-established conference designed specifically for researchers in the area of heuristic search and combinatorial optimization. The DC program of SoCS is designed to support the research and career development of Ph.D. students at all stages of their academic journey. Key activities of the DC program include a mentorship program that pairs students with senior researchers, a number of master classes that cover various interesting research topics in the area, a career-advice talk by a senior researcher that offers research advice to students, as well as both oral and poster presentation opportunities for students to share their research. These activities provide great opportunities for students to engage with established researchers, get feedback on their research, gain advice on career possibilities, and network with peers and international researchers, potentially leading to future collaborations. Heuristic search and combinatorial optimization have been at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the very early days of AI. Research in this area has steadily grown and advanced significantly during the 21st century. For example, search is now a dominant paradigm in planning, robotics, discrete optimization, video games, GPS navigation, autonomous warehouses, and other areas of computer science and operations research. A significant aspect of SoCS is its strong focus on nurturing and supporting students in the field of heuristic search and combinatorial optimization. Supporting student travel to SoCS offers numerous benefits beyond the DC program. Sponsored students will have full access to the main SoCS conference with a well-developed program covering a diverse range of research areas in this community with invited talks, presentations, posters, community meetings, and social activities, providing students with great opportunities to engage in discussion with researchers worldwide and explore new research directions and topics. 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.