ACM SIGMOD 2008
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH POSTER COMPETITION
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
SIGMOD/PODS 2008 CONFERENCE
June 9-12, 2008, Vancouver, Canada

Chair: Lukasz Golab
       AT&T Labs-Research
       lgolab@research.att.com

This year's SIGMOD conference will give undergraduate students an 
opportunity to showcase their research accomplishments in a poster 
competition. Up to five students will be selected to attend the 
conference and present posters to other attendees of 
SIGMOD/PODS 2008. For each invited student, up to US$1000 will be 
provided to defray conference attendance costs (registration 
fee, travel, lodging, etc). A "best poster" winner will be 
selected by the competition chair and announced at the SIGMOD 2008 
awards session.

Undergraduate students who have played a key role in a research 
project are invited to submit an abstract to the poster competition. 
Any research projects broadly related to data management are within 
the scope of the competition (for a list of sample areas of interest, 
see the SIGMOD call for papers at www.sigmod08.org/sigmod_call_papers.shtml).
Based on the abstracts, the competition chair will choose up to five 
students to invite to the SIGMOD/PODS conference and present posters. 
For the purposes of this competition, a student is considered an 
undergraduate student if he/she has not yet obtained a BS (or 
equivalent) degree or has obtained that degree on or after December 2007, 
and he/she is not enrolled in a graduate program at the time of submission. 
If the applicant's school system is "non-traditional", and the 
applicant considers him/herself eligible, then the competition
chair should be contacted before an abstract is submitted.


Submission Guidelines:

In order to submit an abstract to the research poster competition, 
students must send an email to the competition chair (lgolab@research.att.com)
by Friday, April 4, 2008, 5pm PST. The subject of the email must be 
" SIGMOD UNDERGRADUATE POSTER COMPETITION". 
The following information must be included (not attached) in the 
email in plain text. No HTML, PDF, Postscript or any other formats 
will be accepted.

1. Name of department and school, and current academic status, including
   the number of years until graduation.
2. Name of academic advisor.
3. An abstract of up to 800 words explaining the proposed content of the 
   poster, including:
   a) a clear and concise problem statement,
   b) brief technical overview of the solution,
   c) summary of major results (e.g., "faster than existing solutions
      by x percent").
4. Description of the role played by the student in the project.

All submissions must be in plain text with the proper subject line as 
explained above. Any submission that does not satisfy these conditions 
may be flagged as junk mail and automatically discarded without further 
notification. Decisions will be emailed by Monday, April 14, 2008; 
authors of accepted abstracts will receive further instructions at that 
time. The competition chair reserves the right to reject all submissions.

Note: submissions to the research poster competition are permitted even 
if the student already has a paper on the same topic due to appear at the
SIGMOD/PODS 2008 conference.


Important Dates:

- Submission deadline: Friday, April 4, 2008, 5pm PST
- Notification of results: Monday, April 14, 2008


Comments and questions should be directed to the competition chair at 
lgolab@research.att.com.