SOSP Professional Travel Scholarship: Reflections by Recipient Artur Baruchi

Abstract

My participation in SOSP, enabled by the Travel Scholarship program, was full of remarkable experiences. The time outside of the conference sessions was valuable and I was able to meet many new people and make friends, so even this aspect of the experience was a big win, and worth it. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, participating in SOSP was particularly beneficial to me. Here in Brazil, unfortunately, we don’t have systems conferences (at least of this size) happening regularly. And when I have previously participated in a scientific event of similar size, time constraints did not allow me to attend all the presentations. Thus, I can say that SOSP was my first participation in a conference of this magnitude. As a future researcher, and current student at the University of Sao Paulo, the SOSP participation benefited me in several ways, but the most important was the contact with others researchers and professors that already have an established research career. Talking with them was very helpful. Another significant benefit was being able to see the huge participation of companies supporting the conference and offering research positions. Beyond the prospects of future research and the student aspects, the conference was, somehow, inspiring. During the dinner, that was offered by the conference, I had the opportunity to talk with other students. Many are in the same situation that I am facing in my own research, while others have already passed through the same problems that I am facing. These student colleagues shared many tips and advice. Part of the agreement in receiving this scholarship was to share my experiences from SOSP with both my colleagues at HP Sao Paulo and at my university. When I returned to Brazil, I prepared a presentation for colleagues at the University of Sao Paulo. My presentation was roughly an hour and a half. Many in the audience knew of SOSP, but few of them had had the opportunity to attend. Given that they already are familiar with the conference, I was able to talk about specific works that were relevant and of interest to them. Also, I talked about my conversations with other students, researchers, and professors about ideas for collaboration on papers and about new investments in equipment. Creating and preparing a presentation for my colleagues at HP Sao Paulo was a much greater challenge. Since the focus of my work at HP is not systems research, I wanted a presentation that would illustrate the benefits of academic research for working professional engineers. The majority of people in the audience had little contact with academia and I needed, at the very beginning of the presentation, to talk about academic conferences, why they are important, how hard is to have an accepted paper in conferences like SOSP, etc. After that, I talked about past papers of the SOSP to show that some of the technologies that they use were first presented in SOSP and after some years these ideas and systems became part of products. I focused on papers that I believed that were more relevant to the audience and tried to present in a language that was more more objective (without many mathematical formalisms). I’m very glad to the conference organization for this opportunity afforded by the Travel Scholarship program. The conference was an outstanding example of great organization and a great program of very quality papers and works presented. I hope to participate in future SOSP conferences and, maybe, have an accepted paper in the future.