MODELS 2024 will host an ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). The ACM SRC is a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research, exchange ideas, and improve their communication skills while competing for prizes at MODELS 2024. The Student Research Competition has the following goals (for general information on the ACM SRC see https://src.acm.org/):

• To give undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to share their research ideas and results at MODELS in a special forum that provides visibility for their work.
• To give students the opportunity to meet with and interact with MODELS attendees to share ideas, gain new insights, and understand possible practical applications.
• To give students an opportunity to sharpen their communication skills, including visual, organizational, oral, and aural modalities.
• To provide detailed feedback to students about their research and presentation, from a panel of distinguished judges.
• To recognize and reward outstanding student research.

Call for Participation

To participate in the competition, students should submit electronically an extended abstract through the ACM SRC@MODELS 2024 submission web page.

• Submissions should be related to the MODELS main topics of interest (see the call for conference papers for a list of the conference topics).
• The submissions should describe: research problem and motivation, background and related work, approach and uniqueness, results, and contributions.
• Abstracts should not exceed 4 pages, including all figures, tables, appendices, etc.
• All submissions must be in PDF.
• Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.
• The review process will be single-blind. Thus, the authors must indicate their name and affiliation in their submissions.
• By submitting to the MODELS ACM SRC, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism. In particular, papers submitted to the MODELS 2024 ACM SRC must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for MODELS 2024 ACM SRC.
• By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are acknowledging that you are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
• Please ensure that you obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and has recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. ACM are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Submissions that do not adhere to these topics and limits, or that violate the formatting guidelines will be desk-rejected without review.

A panel of experts will review the submissions and select the students to participate in the first round of the competition (Poster Round), which will be held at MODELS 2024 in Linz, Austria. Submissions that are accepted to the competition will be published in the MODELS companion proceedings.

1. Participants must be undergraduate or graduate students pursuing an academic degree (i.e., they must be enrolled in a university or college) at the time of initial submission.
2. Participants must register for MODELS. Details about the registration required will be provided in due course.
3. Participants must have an active ACM student membership, and must provide their ACM member number.
4. Supervisors of the work may not be listed as co-authors; students must submit a single-authored version of their work for the competition.
5. The contest has two categories, one for undergraduate research and the other for graduate research. Three winners will be selected in each category. 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.
6. Team projects will be accepted from Undergraduate students. One person should be designated by the team to attend the conference and make the oral presentation. Should the designated presenter win first, second or third place in competition only they will receive the medal and monetary award. Only individual research is accepted from Graduate (Master’s or PhD program) students; group research projects will not be considered. 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 medal and monetary award (should they win).
7. Students may only participate in one SRC per program year (April 1–March 31). Students that have applied to an SRC, but have not been accepted, may respond to other SRC calls for participation during the program year.

First Round of Competition – The Abstract Submission

The first round of the competition consists of the submission of an abstract describing the research. A committee of experts will review the submitted abstracts and select those that will be invited for the second round of the competition.

Second Round of Competition – The Poster Session

The second round of the competition will take place in Linz during the MODELS 2024 conference. It will consist of a poster session. Students will be given the opportunity to present their research to the conference attendees and leading experts in the software engineering field, including the SRC committee. Judges will review the posters and speak to participants about their research; a group of semi-finalists will be chosen to present at the third round of the competition.

Third Round of Competition – The Presentation Session

A subset of the SRC participants will be selected to continue in the third and final round of the competition by giving a 10-minute presentation of their research before a panel of judges in a special session at the conference. After each presentation, there will be a 5-minute question and answer period. Three winners will be chosen in each category, undergraduate and graduate (Master’s or PhD program), who will receive prizes.

Judging Criteria

Abstracts will be evaluated by at least three experts. The experts will evaluate the abstract/research based on:

Posters will be evaluated by at least five experts. The experts will evaluate the poster based on:

The top five students in each category (undergraduate and graduate) will advance to the next round (semi-finals). A minimum of five judges will be assigned to the semi-finals. Each judge will evaluate the students’ presentations of the research based on:

Prizes

The top three undergraduate and graduate winners receive prizes of USD 500, USD 300, and USD 200, respectively, and an award medal, all sponsored by the ACM. All participants receive a certificate of participation from the ACM.

MODELS 2024 Awardees Participate in SRC Grand Finals

The first-place winners in each category (undergraduate and graduate) from the SRC held at MODELS 2024 will advance to the SRC Grand Finals. A different panel of judges will evaluate 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. Winners of the SRC Grand Finals are recognized at the Annual ACM Awards Banquet, usually held in June as well as on the ACM SRC website.