ACM SIGCOMM Student Research Competition (SRC)

Introduction

The ACM SIGCOMM Student Research Competition (SRC) offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences. Winners of the ACM SIGCOMM SRC at SIGCOMM will advance to ACM Grand Finals of the Student Research Competition to compete against the winners of other ACM conferences. The SRC, including a small travel budget for each participant, is sponsored by Microsoft Research.

How does the competition work?

The ACM SRC at SIGCOMM organizes two distinct competitions for undergraduate and graduate students. The timeline of the competition is as follows:

Pre-selection: Students submit their work as a poster/demo here. See eligibility criteria below.
1st round “Poster session”: The selected students register to the conference and present their work in front of the conference attendees. Specifications on poster size and content will be defined by the SRC chairs. Students are expected to discuss their work with evaluators who visit their presentation areas. Each evaluator will rate the student’s visual presentation based on the criteria of uniqueness of the approach, the significance of the contribution, visual presentation, and format of presentation. The evaluation criteria used can be found under General Judging Criteria.
2nd round “Presentation session”: A separate session is scheduled for semi-finalists to give a ten minute presentation followed by a five minute question and answer period. This session will be attended by the evaluators and any interested conference attendees. The top three finalists in each category will be chosen based on these presentations.
Announcement of Three Finalists In Each Category (Undergraduate and Graduate): This usually takes place at a well-attended session of the conference. Each student will receive their prize after the conference. The first place winners will compete in the Grand Finals, which takes place toward the end of the program year.
The Grand Finals: The undergraduate and graduate first place winners from all SRCs for the program year compete in the Grand Finals. More information here.

Who is eligible?

You have to submit a poster or demo abstract to SIGCOMM (Poster and Demo page). Qualified entrants must have current ACM student membership, have graduate or undergraduate student status at the time of submission, and be the lead student author of the project. If a graduate or undergraduate student is part of a group research project and wishes to participate in an SRC, they will be required to submit a separate write-up describing their individual contribution to the group research project if they are selected, and present it during the first and second round “poster” and “presentation” sessions (see the above section). Following the same spirit, in case of demo submissions, the student contributions should be clearly defined.

Submissions must be original research that is not already published at another conference or journal (e.g., please do not submit your dissertation summary as your abstract). One of the goals of the SRC is to give students feedback on ongoing, unpublished work. Note that submissions based on work accepted at this SIGCOMM will not be considered eligible.

The SRC does count as a presentation venue, and submitting the work that is being submitted at other venues would violate the ACM SIGCOMM duplicate submission policy.

You can only participate in one ACM SIGCOMM SRC per year.

Selected students must register to the ACM SIGCOMM conference.

How to participate?

The ACM SIGCOMM poster and demo sessions will also serve as an ACM SIGCOMM Student Research Competition. To enter the first stage of the SRC, submit a poster or demo abstract. SRC submissions should be at most 100 word abstracts. Submissions should not exceed the minimum between two (2) pages and 800 words. If a submission has multiple authors, please provide the name of your advisor or supervisor when submitting the paper. The candidate student should be the first author. While not mandatory, entrants are encouraged to submit a letter from their advisor/supervisors describing the specific contributions made by the student. Undergraduates and graduate students will be treated in separate divisions (students starting their first year of graduate school at the time of the conference will be considered as undergraduates). Tick the corresponding box when submitting your work.

A small travel supplement of 500 USD is made available to accepted SRC entrants; please also submit applications for travel grant support. More information here.

List of winners

Undergraduate winners:
- 1st place: Zili Meng, Tsinghua University
  
  “PAM: When Overloaded, Push Your Neighbor Aside!”
- 2nd place: Gonzalo Marín, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
  
  “RawPower: Deep Learning based Anomaly Detection from Raw Network Traffic Measurements”
- 3rd place: Angelo Tulumello, CNIT/Rome Tor Vergata University
  
  “A Fully Portable TCP Implementation Using XFSMs”

Graduate winners:
- 1st place: Suraj Jog, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
  
  “Enabling Dense Spatial Reuse in mmWave Networks”
- 2nd place: Marcin Nawrocki, Freie Universität Berlin
  
  “On the Potential of BGP Flowspec for DDoS Mitigation at Two Sources: ISP and IXP”
- 3rd place: Pedro Marcos, UFRGS and FURG
  
  “Dynam-IX: a Dynamic Interconnection eXchange”