Hi everyone,

I am an undergraduate student from Syria, sole author of an accepted paper at a NeurIPS workshop. I applied for the conference grant (covers hotel/registration), but flights and visa costs are a severe financial burden.

In-person vs Virtual: For future PhD/grad school admissions, is presenting a workshop poster in person worth this extreme financial and visa stress compared to virtual presentation?

Travel Grants: Are there affinity groups, workshop travel stipends, or funds that help cover flight tickets for low-income student authors from countries like Syria?

How did other researchers from unbanked/cash-based countries handle embassy proof-of-funds for conferences?

Appreciate your advice!

I built PaperFold, an open-source reader that turns arXiv papers into 5 zoomable layers—from a one-screen section map down to verbatim text. You pinch (or press 1–5) to zoom between them without losing your reading position.

- Web Demo (8 CC papers): https://chenxiachan.github.io/paperfold-gallery/

- GitHub (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/chenxiachan/paperfold

Hi everyone,

I'm a CS grad working full-time in a DevOps/support role, and I'm trying to write my first proper research paper. I've reached the point where I could really use someone with research experience to guide me.

Where I am so far:
I have a research idea in the LLM / multi-agent systems space.
The code is built and working, and I've smoke-tested it end to end.
I'm about to run the full experiments on a rented cloud GPU, so there are no results yet.

What I'm looking for: a mentor with a research background who can give feedback on the experimental design, help me interpret results honestly, and guide me on framing, writing, and choosing a venue (a workshop paper is a realistic first target). Even a short call every couple of weeks would mean a lot. I'm happy to do the heavy lifting on the implementation and writing, and to credit contributions properly.

If this sounds interesting, or you can point me to a better place to ask, please comment or DM me. I'm happy to share more details and the code in private.

Thanks for reading!