ACM Student Research Competition Review Guidelines

Review Timeline

Reviewing Phase Start Date End Date
Reviewing Saturday, October 19, 2019 Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Discussion & Recommendations Thursday, November 7, 2019 Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Overview

The ACM Student Research Competition, sponsored by Microsoft Research, offers a unique opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research in any area of computer science at SIGCSE. There are two categories of competition, graduate and undergraduate, with prizes awarded based on judging during the conference. A submission to the Student Research Competition should describe recently completed or ongoing student research in any area of Computer Science. All graduate submissions must represent a student’s individual research contribution–neither supervisors or other students are allowed as co-authors. Undergraduate submissions may represent individual or team research contributions. Research completed while the student was an undergraduate may be submitted to the undergraduate category even if the student is now a first-year graduate student.

Students whose ACM SRC abstracts that are accepted as a result of review, will be invited to make poster presentations at the conference. The top three to five poster presenters at the undergraduate and graduate levels will be invited to present their work. The top three will be recognized at the Saturday plenary.

ACM SRC review is NOT blind.

Review Guidelines

Keep in mind that ACM SRC submissions represent student work and they are meant to be a place to present and receive feedback on work by early researchers. Please provide constructive feedback and clearly justify your choice of rating to help the authors. A review that gives a low score with no written comments is not helpful to the authors since it simply tells the authors that they have been unsuccessful, with no indication of how or why.

Reviewers should evaluate student abstracts on the following criteria by providing a numeric score and summary of the contribution in each area:

  • Problem and motivation
  • Background and related work
  • Approach and uniqueness
  • Results and contribution

Additionally, reviewers will be asked to summarize the work, provide their familiarity with the submission topic, identify if the research topic is an appropriate computer science sub-discipline, identify strengths and weaknesses of the submissions, and provide an overall evaluation. Reviewers may provide confidential comments to the program committee to address concerns about the submission. These comments will not be shared with submitting authors.