Yahoo!-DAIS Research Excellence Award

Rules for Research Excellence Award Competition

To promote research excellence in the field of Data and Information Systems (DAIS), Yahoo! has generously contributed a special fund to set up a research excellence award for young researchers (students and post-doctors) in The Data and Information Systems (DAIS) Research Lab in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We name this award as Yahoo!-DAIS Research Excellence Award and propose the following rules for award competition.

1. Time of competition: We plan to organize the award competition twice a year, one in the Spring semester and one in the early Fall semester. Usually, the time will be after most conferences have announced their evaluation results for the work submitted in the evaluation period. That means that the quality of the work may have been evaluated by the external review committees in the corresponding fields. For example, at the beginning of the Fall semester, most of the work in the Spring submitted to the conferences should have received the acceptance/rejection notices.

2. Research work counted towards the competition: Except for the first time, when we will count the whole academic year’s work (i.e., those accepted and/or published between Sept. 2010 to Aug. 2011), we will count only the work published/accepted after the last evaluation. All the regular research papers, poster/short papers, and system demonstration papers accepted or published in scientific journals, conferences, and workshops are counted toward the evaluation and competition. However, it is important to mark the category of each paper clearly, such as full paper, poster/short paper, demonstration paper, position paper, etc., with the full citation (i.e., as appearing in the journal, conference or workshop and in your resume), as well as the acceptance ratio if available.

3. Eligibility for award competition: All the (graduate, undergraduate, and visiting) students and post-doctors in the areas of Data and Information Systems, who worked in the Lab during the period of evaluation (i.e., including those who just graduated or departed). To make our evaluation more focused, we require (1) the candidate should have at least one full research or demonstration paper accepted or published in a major conference or journal during the period of evaluation, and (2) the candidate would like to stand out for competition.

4. Evaluation Process: Once the call for award competition is announced, those who would like to stand out for the competition should inform the evaluation committee chair their willingness to competition within 5 days of announcement, submitting the web-link of a dedicated evaluation page, which should contain the full bibliography of the papers eligible for competition (i.e., excluding the previous publications and the papers just submitted, rejected, or in preparation), and the content of each paper must be downloadable (in PDF) or system demo links if available. Please also mark those papers that are award candidates/recipients or being invited for journal submission. We will hold a one-hour seminar (likely Yahoo!-DAIS seminar time) for technical briefing: Each candidate is given a short time (e.g., 5 minutes) to brief his/her work, following by a poster session where the candidates will be able to answer specific questions in depth.

5. Voting Process: Once the evaluation process is finished, the award committee chair will announce the voting website and a few days of time for people to vote. All the DAIS lab members, including professors, students and post-doctors working in the lab, are eligible and encouraged to vote. One can vote for at most one GOLD (5 points), one SILVER (4 points), one BORNZE (3 points) and up to three honorable mentionings (2 points each). The final winners are those who got the highest accumulative points for GOLD, the second highest for SILVE, then BRONZE and Honorable mentioning, respectively. We will usually award one GOLD, one SILVER, one BRONZE, and one or two honorable mentionings. However, in case that two candidates tied in one category of award (such as Silver), two such awards will be given.

6. Award: Winners will be announced by e-mail and on the DAIS webpage, and the winners will receive awards at the Yahoo!-DAIS Research Excellence Award ceremony. Gold, Silver and Bronze awardees will present their work at a special Yahoo!-DAIS Research Award Seminar. It will be a big honor for every awardee and a good credit to be included in the resume.