Travel: Support for Student Conference Participation at the ACM UMAP Conference 2025

This award provides funding to support about 10 students enrolled in PhD or masters programs in U.S. educational institutions to present their accepted papers and posters and attend the Doctoral Consortium associated with the 2025 International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2025). User modeling is an increasingly valuable method for enhancing the effectiveness and usability of software. Applications of user modeling include recommender systems, adaptive educational systems, human-robot interaction, and many more domains. UMAP is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users, to groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information. Active participation of young researchers in this conference is very important for the health of the field and for the researchers themselves. Thus, by bringing young and creative researchers to the 2025 UMAP conference, the requested funds will help advance an important and socially valuable research field. Supporting student travel to the UMAP doctoral consortium will help train advanced professionals in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This funding is critical because attending conferences is expensive and students do not have other means of support. The application and selection process is designed to create a cohort of students from a wide range of disciplinary, institutional, and topical backgrounds that have promising research trajectories related to the key themes of the conference. This cohort-building, combined with the connections students will make with doctoral consortium mentors and other conference attendees, will provide valuable academic and personal support toward advancing their careers, and the UMAP community as a whole. 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.