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ACM SIGMOD 2021 Student Research Competition

Student Research Competition Program

Round 2 - June 22 09:30 - 12:30 ET
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~xihe/srcposter2021/

SIGMOD 2021 will host the second ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), sponsored by Microsoft. This competition offers undergraduate and graduate students a unique forum to experience the research world, present their research results to conference attendees, and compete for prizes. Such competitions have been held at many other SIG-sponsored conferences, such as SIGGRAPH, FSE, PLDI, and MobiCom.

The competition will have separate undergraduate and graduate categories, and consist of three rounds:

The abstract submission will be done online before the conference. A PC will review the submissions and invite selected students to attend SIGMOD 2021 to present a poster. A panel of judges will then review the posters and select students to give a research talk on the next day where the final winners will be determined. Three winners from each category will be chosen, with the grand winner of each category will advance to the ACM-wide competition

Final Round - June 23, 07:30 - 10:30 ET

Important Dates

Prizes

The top three winners in each category (undergraduate and graduate) will be recognized during the conference and will receive prizes of US$500, US$300, and US$200, respectively. The top three winners in each category also receive an award medal and a one-year complimentary ACM student membership with a subscription to ACM’s Digital Library.

The first-place winners of each category will be invited to compete with winners from other conferences in the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals.

PC members list

Xi He, University of Waterloo
Yongjoo Park, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Dong Deng, Rutgers University
Steven Whang, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Cong Yan, Microsoft Research
Shumo Chu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Vasiliki Kalavri, Boston University
Ce Zhang, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich
Babak Salimi, University of California San Diego
Kantikiran Pasupuleti, Oracle
Utku Sirin, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
Ios Kotsogiannis, Snap Inc.
Eric (Erkang) Zhu, Microsoft Research
Yang Cao, Kyoto University
Min-soo Kim, KAIST
Farhana Choudhury, The University of Melbourne
Laurel Orr, Stanford University
Angelos Christos Anadiotis, Ecole Polytechnique, IPP and EPFL

The Competition

First Round: Abstract Submission

Submit a 2-page abstract online. The 2-page limit includes text, appendices, and figures. References do not count against the page limit and can expand into subsequent pages. The abstract should be written in English using the ACM template. The abstract should address a topic that is relevant to the SIGMOD/PODS community and include the following:

Make sure you submit your abstract in PDF format by 5PM Pacific Time, December 09, 2020 on the submission website. Please read the FAQ below before you submit.

Sampled abstracts from previous competitions

Sample from SRC 2020 (Graduate):

Interactive data visualization and exploration (DVE) applications, such as the one in Figure 1, have rapidly grown in popularity with use cases in numerous sectors [2, 4, 9, 11, 15]. Like typical web services, DVE applications may be run on heterogeneous client devices and networks, with users expecting fast response times under 100 ms [12]. However, the resource demands of DVE applications are magnified and highly unpredictable, making it difficult to achieve such interactivity.

Full version: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3384405

Sample from SRC 2020 (Undergraduate):

Selecting the optimal storage engine and tuning for an application requires comparing the latency of diverse workloads executed on different data structures. In this work, we start to develop an average-case analysis of the performance of storage engines that can achieve significantly more accurate predictions than existing worst-case models. We propose a distribution-aware framework to predict the latency of diverse workloads executed on a vast number of data structures. As a case study, we use our framework to produce cost models for a diverse family of key-value storage engine tunings, and verify our models on RocksDB and WiredTiger.

Full version: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3384408

Second Round: Poster Presentation

The SRC PC will select a number of students from the abstract to advance to the second round. The second round of the competition will take place online at the SIGMOD 2021 conference and will be a poster session. This is your opportunity to present your research to conference attendees and leading experts in data management, including the SRC committee.

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 select students to advance to the third round of the competition.

Third Round: Research Talk

The judges will select students from the second round to give a short (10 min max) online presentation of their research. After each presentation, there will be a short question and answer session.

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. At most three winners will be chosen in each category, undergraduate and graduate, and receive prize.

Grand Finals

The first-place winner in each category (undergraduate and graduate) from the SRC will advance to the SRC Grand Finals. A different panel of judges evaluates the winners of all SRCs held during the calendar year 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 (aka Turing Awards ceremony, among other things), where they receive formal recognition.

Who is eligible?

For further questions please contact the organizers.

Program Committee

Xi He, University of Waterloo
Yongjoo Park, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the SRC differ from the SIGMOD programming contest?

The programming contest targets student teams who are interested in solving coding problems. The SRC aims to encourage research contributions from student researchers at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

What about the undergraduate poster competition?

There won't be a separate undergraduate poster competition this year.

Can students submit in teams?

Team projects will be accepted from Undergraduates. One person should be designated by the team to make the oral presentation, and only one person will receive the travel stipend per Undergraduate project. Only individual research is accepted from Graduate (Masters or PhD program) students: group research projects will not be considered. However, if an individual is part of a group research project and wants to participate in an SRC, they can only present their part of the research. Only they will receive the travel stipend and monetary award (should they win).

Can we submit the same manuscript as in our SIGMOD 2nd round submissions / demo submissions / some other paper that is currently under submission?

Unfortunately not. The SRC does count as a presentation venue, and submitting the same work as will violate SIGMOD's duplicate submission policy.

I already competed in another SRC this year, can I still participate?

You can only participate in one SRC per year. See this website for further information.

For further questions please contact the organizers.

Note that if your submission to SRC includes a significantly different work/problem as the other submissions (though they may be about the same project), it doesn't violate the duplicate submission policy.



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