The latest number of the IEEE IT Professional magazine (May/June 2018) features an invited paper on "Recognizing Student Research through Symposia and Competitions" for its Student Forum colum. The article proposes a reflection upon the role and attendance of students at scientific conferences, especially in computer science and engineering. In fact, most major computer science and engineering conferences have low paper-acceptance rates also to maintain high-quality presentations and results, and dedicated funds for student attendance are often limited. However, student participation in conferences is important as they are the next generation of researchers. To overcome this issue, more conferences are organizing student-related activities, such as student research symposia and competitions.

The article tries to analyze which benefits students have in joining such student-related initiatives and why conferences should increasingly adopt these initiatives. It presents, then, the experience of the Student Research Symposium held at IEEE COMPSAC 2017, as a positive case study.

The paper was jointly written by Luigi De Russis and Kenichi Yoshida (University of Tsukuba, Japan), co-chairs of the COMPSAC 2017 Student Research Symposium.

More information:

• Paper in IEEE Xplore
• Paper on PORTO@IRIS
• DOI: 10.1109/MITP.2018.032501753