This award will support student travel to the Graduate Consortium at this year's IEEE Conference on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), to be held Sep 2, 2024 in Liverpool, UK at the beginning of the VL/HCC conference. VL/HCC is the premier international forum for research on the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and programming languages that are easy for people to learn, use, and understand. The graduate consortium is a long-running event at the conference designed to provide junior researchers the chance to get feedback about their in-progress dissertation work from expert researchers in the field. Through close interaction with mentors, other student participants, and general conference attendees, junior researchers will build connections to the VL/HCC research community that will be valuable for both their future work and the community. <br/><br/>This grant will provide travel support to about 8 students who otherwise have limited travel funding and so might not be able to attend. Criteria for selection include having the need for funding, the estimated potential benefits to the attendee in terms of their work's maturity and timing, the potential for the student's work to advance VL/HCC research. In alignment with the graduate consortium's overall goal to bring together diverse perspectives on the problem, the selection committee will also seek to fund students from a wide range of personal, professional, disciplinary, and institutional backgrounds.<br/><br/>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.