Dr. Dilma Da Silva, department head, professor and holder of the Ford Motor Company Design Professorship II in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, served as co-chair of the 2017 Advanced Computing Systems Association (USENIX) annual technical conference (ATC) in Santa Clara, California, July 12-14.
As co-chair with Dr. Bryan Ford, associate professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Da Silva led the program committee responsible for the event. The conference boasted industry talks, a poster session and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, where attendees had the opportunity to meet in an informal setting.
The three-day conference, which highlights innovative research, brought together professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds and provided students the opportunity to interact with senior researchers in the field. USENIX is committed to providing open access to research. The conference hosted over 300 attendees and had almost 300 paper submissions, 60 of which were accepted.
In addition to serving as co-chair of the conference, Da Silva was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation, which allowed the conference to provide travel awards to 20 graduate students.
“Serving at large conferences is always a lot of work, but the USENIX ATC experience left me inspired by the dedication of the 33 program committee members,” Da Silva said. “Altogether, they wrote more than 920 detailed reviews and traveled to California for a two-day program committee meeting. The result was an outstanding program.”