The content of this blog post is applicable to everyone who is currently a registered student in a university and is planning to apply for travel grants to attend an academic conference or workshop. This post is written from the perspective of a student either in home country or on the status of international student.
There are two categories of students who want to attend an academic conference
(i) Authors who have a paper/poster accepted and are looking for funding
(ii) Students who want to attend a conference without an accepted paper/poster
To the best of my knowledge there is higher chances of securing travel grant if you have an accepted paper/poster at the conference with few exceptions.
Here are the conference specific funding sources that you could apply to support your conference registration and travel:
- Apply as student volunteer : Almost all conferences waive registration fee for student volunteers. This is a great way to involve in organization process and reduce conference costs.
- Apply Conference Travel Grants: All conferences offer limited travel grants to support students.
- Workshop Travel Grants : If you have a paper at workshop, some of them support the accepted papers by providing partial/full travel grants.
- Submit your work to Doctoral Consortium or Student Research Workshops who usually have funds to support student travel.
Additionally, you can apply to external sources to attend conferences:
- Industry Travel Grants: Google , Microsoft
- If you are a woman you can apply to ACM-Women Scholarships to attend research conferences. Or submit a poster to women oriented workshops co-located with conferences such as WiML, WiCV or WiNLP who offer generous travel support for women and under-represented groups.
- Country specific grants: For example Science and Engineering Research Board of India offers International conference travel support.
Hope you find the information useful. I will keep updating the page whenever I find relevant information.