INFORMS Open Forum

INFORMS Service Science Section Best Student Paper Award Competition Sponsored by:

IBM Research

(Deadline for Submission: September 1, 2019)

Purpose

The INFORMS Service Science Section announces the 2019 IBM Best Student Paper Award to recognize excellence among its student members and bring prestige to the Service Science Section as well as to the recipients honored.

The INFORMS Service Science Section promotes and disseminates research and applications among professionals interested in theory, methodologies, and applications in Service Science. The Section provides a forum to exchange new ideas and disseminate new findings in Service Science.

From among nominated student research papers, a panel of Service Science Section leaders will choose a pool of student finalists for the Best Student Paper Award. These finalist students will be invited to present their research findings in front of a panel of judges at the Annual INFORMS Conference in Seattle, WA, October 20-23, 2019. Note that students must present their research in this session, in person, to qualify for an award. The judging panel will then decide the order of winners, which will be announced during the business meeting of the Service Science Section.

 Awards

• The first-place winner will receive $300.
• The second-place winner will receive $200.
• The third-place winner will receive $100.
• All finalists will receive a plaque or award certificate.

(If a multiple-author paper wins, the award check will be divided equally among the authors.)

Award Selection Criteria

The evaluation process will be conducted in two steps:

1. Student finalists will be chosen by the Awards Committee from the pool of student research papers submitted for the competition. Each student can submit only one paper. Each paper will be evaluated for:
2. Academic significance (originality, depth, completeness and work's potential impact on future service science research).
3. Business relevance (importance of the problem and its impact on service engineering or business practice).
4. Fit with the INFORMS service science section.

Finalists will be invited to present in a live award competition session during the INFORMS annual conference in Seattle, WA in October 2019. A panel of Service Science scholars will determine the final ordering of the award winners. During the Service Science Section business meeting, the award winners will be announced.

Eligibility Requirements and Author Guidelines

• The first author of the paper must be a student at the time of submission, or have been a student during academic year 2018-2019. Students must not have completed their PhD prior to September 1, 2019.
• Student author must be a member of the Service Science Section before submitting her/his paper. Submissions from students who are not members of the Service Science Section will be discarded without notice.
• The paper can be under review at any journal or conference but it cannot be accepted for publication nor published already.
• Paper topic must fit Service Science subject areas.
• A paper can only be submitted to one category award sponsored by the Service

Science Section.

• Submitted papers MUST represent original work, for which the student was the primary author and majority contributor.
• Because IBM is the award sponsor, co-authors cannot be IBM employees.
• Submitted Paper Format: The paper should be no more than 32 pages, double- spaced (15 pages if single spaced), in 11- or 12-point Times Roman font or similar. Paper format should follow typical INFORMS journal layout conventions. Appendices are excluded from the page limit.
• The submitted paper file (PDF) should be sent by email to the Service Science Award

Committee Co-chair, Dr. Paul Messinger (paul.messinger@ualberta.ca) by the due date. Papers received after the due date will not be reviewed for competition.

• Members of the awards committee and officers/council members of the Service

Science Section are ineligible to participate in the competition.

• IBM employees are ineligible to participate in the competition.

Awards Committee:

The Awards Committee consists of Dr. Paul Messinger (Chair of the Service Science Section, Co-chair of the committee), Dr. Aly Megahed (Secretary of the Service Science Section, Co-chair of the committee), and Ming-Hui Huang (Chair-Elect of the Service Science Section). Other committee members will be invited.

What to Submit:

To be considered for this year's competition, please email one pdf that has the following (in order in the same pdf file) to the Award Committee co-chair:

• A one page letter in PDF format from one faculty co-author articulating the student's role in writing this paper. The letter should confirm that the student is a student at the time of submission, or has been a student during academic year 2018-2019. Please, note that without this letter, your paper will not be considered.
• If the paper is under review by any publishers, please let us know where and when it is submitted, and at what stage of the review process it is. Add this to the above letter.
• Following the above letter, there should be the electronic version of your paper in the same pdf file, i.e., starting at page 2 of the pdf file.
• The subject of the email needs to be "2019 IBM Best Student Paper Award"

Where to submit:

Paul Messinger (Award Committee Co-chair), University of Alberta.
Email: paul.messinger@ualberta.ca

Deadline:
Deadline for paper submission is September 1^st, 2019.

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Paul Messinger
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB
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