Best Student Paper -- Application Process

The broad criteria for selecting the recipient of the QSR Best Student Paper Award are

• Academic significance (originality, depth, and completeness of the work and its potential impact on future research) and
• Engineering or business relevance (importance of the problem and its impact on engineering or business practice).

Eligibility Requirements and Application Process:

• Award nominees must be a student member of the QSR Section.
• Paper topic must fit QSR themes.
• The student must be the first author. Moreover, a formal, signed statement by the student's advisor should be submitted along with the paper affirming that the majority of the original results presented in the paper are due to the student rather than the advisor or other collaborators involved in the work.
• The paper must be completed during the first author's undergraduate or graduate studies.
• Previous finalists who wish to compete again should submit an entirely different paper. However, past winners are not eligible for the competition.
• The student must be committed to present the paper at a special session on Sunday, the first day of the annual Fall INFORMS conference.
• Finalists may not be announced until other INFORMS sessions are already organized. Thus, papers considered for this competition MAY be simultaneously submitted to other sessions at the INFORMS conference. If a finalist is scheduled to present in another session, then they will present the paper twice: once in the QSR Best Student Paper Competition session on Sunday and once in their previously scheduled session.
• QSR Section does NOT own copyrights of the paper. However, the paper must be available to the QSR Section to be posted on their web page.
• Submitted Paper Format: The Paper should be 4-6 pages, single-spaced, with two columns in 10 point Times Roman or Times New Roman typeface. Margins should be 1 inch or more. Papers should begin with a 50 word abstract. Please submit a blinded as well as an unblinded version. The submitted paper must follow the format or will be returned without review. A file (in the MS Word or PDF format) should be sent by email to the contest coordinator before the designated deadline. Papers received after the deadline will not be reviewed for the competition.

To enter, submit via email a paper (4-6 pages and in MS WORD or PDF format) on a quality, statistics, or reliability topic to the 2011 contest coordinator, Professor Haitao Liao at hliao4@utk.edu by June 30th, 2011. (PLEASE NOTE THE DEADLINE). Late submission will be ineligible for the contest.

All submitted papers will be reviewed and ranked by external referees and four finalists will be selected and announced on October 1, 2011. For the detailed contest procedures, eligibility, and criteria, please visit the QSR website at http://qsr.section.informs.org/.

2011 Committee Chair

Haitao Liao
e-mail: hiliao4@utk.edu