Student Research Competition‹Programming› 2018

The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft Research, offers a unique forum for ACM student members at the undergraduate and graduate levels to present their original research at <Programming> before a panel of judges and conference attendees. The competition gives students an opportunity to discuss their research with experts in their field, to get feedback, and to help sharpen their communication and networking skills. Finally, the SRC not only provides visibility to up-and-coming young researchers, but also exposes them to the field of computer science research and its community.

Accepted Students

Call for Student Research Competition

In order to participate in the SRC, you have to fulfill the following requirements:

• Current ACM student membership
• Graduate or undergraduate student status (must be currently enrolled in a university or college) at the time of submission
• If selected, participants must register for the conference

If you meet the above requirements and want to participate, you must submit an extended abstract of no more than 800 words, and no more than 2 pages (excluding references) to: phaller@kth.se.

Submission deadline: Mon 22 January 2018 Wed 7 February 2018

Your abstract should conform to the ACM SIGPLAN conference template, using the acmart class with the “sigconf” option, and it should be in 10pt font, and be submitted in PDF format. The research presented in the abstract has to be done on an individual basis for graduate students, but group projects are allowed for undergraduate submissions (one student must be chosen to present the work). The abstract should describe the research problem and motivation, background and related work, the intended solution approach and its uniqueness, results, and contributions.

Your extended abstract will be judged by a panel of judges, and you will be notified if you are accepted as an SRC participant to then attend in Nice, France, in April 2018. If your abstract is accepted, you will have to prepare a poster to present in the first round of competition.

For more information about the ACM SRC, please visit the FAQ.

Student Research Competition Process

There are two rounds of SRC competition that are held during the conference, once your abstract is accepted, and a later Grand Finals competition:

First Round Competitions

The first round is the Poster Session. This is your opportunity to present your research in the areas specified in the conference’s call for papers. Judges will review the posters and speak to participants about their research. The judges will evaluate the research (quality, novelty, and significance) and the presentation of the research (poster, discussion), and a group of semi-finalists will be chosen to present at the second round of the competition.

Second Round Competitions

Semi-finalists continue by giving a short presentation (a ten minute presentation followed by a five minute question and answer period) of their research before a panel of judges, with a supporting slide presentation. Evaluations are based on the presenter’s knowledge of his/her research area, contribution of the research, and the quality of the oral and visual presentation. Three winners will be chosen in each category, undergraduate and graduate, receiving $500, $300, and $200, respectively.

The SRC Grand Finals

First place undergraduate and graduate student winners from the SRCs held during the year advance to the ACM SRC Grand Finals. A different panel of judges evaluates these winners against each other via the web. Three undergraduates and three graduates will be chosen as the SRC Grand Finals winners. They are invited, along with their advisors, to the annual ACM Awards Banquet, where they receive formal recognition.

Travel Expenses

ACM’s SRC program covers expenses up to $500 for all students invited to an SRC. The kinds of conference expenses that are acceptable include:

• Transportation expenses (air, rail, bus, taxi, car service, car rental, parking)
• Meals, hotel, tips
• Supplies for poster development, poster shipment, etc.
• Conference registration

Students will be reimbursed once we receive their SRC Travel Expense report form along with receipts for all expenses above $25.

The winners in the graduate category are:

1. Manuel Rigger, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria (Project: “Safe Execution of LLVM-based Languages on the Java Virtual Machine”)
2. Adilla Susungi, Mines ParisTech, France (Project: “On the Semantics of Loop Transformation Languages”)
3. Toni Mattis, University of Potsdam, Germany (Project: “Mining Concepts from Code using Community Detection in Co-occurrence Graphs”)

The winners in the undergraduate category are:

1. Franklin Schrans, Imperial College London, UK (Project: “Flint: Writing Safe Smart Contracts in Flint”)
2. Ezra Zigmond, Harvard University, USA (Project: “Fine-grained, Dynamic Access Control for Database-backed Applications”)
3. Daniel Slocombe, Imperial College London, UK (Project: “Modelling Optimised ORCA: an Actor Garbage Collection System”)