The MoDELS 2014 hosted the ACM Student Research Competition sponsored by Microsoft Research. The Student Research Competition (SRC) is a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their research, exchange ideas, and improve their communication skills while competing for prizes. The Student Research Competition has the following goals: ─ to give undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to share their research ideas and results in a special forum that provides visibility for their work; ─ to give students the opportunity to meet with and interact with conference 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 from industry and academia to recognize and reward outstanding student research. The contest has two categories, one for undergraduate research and the other for graduate research³. For works accepted to the MoDELS 2014 Student Research Competition, a travel grant of up to US $500 were awarded to help cover travel expenses to the conference. The top three winners at MoDELS 2014 in each category (undergraduate and graduate) received prizes of US $500, US $300, and US $200, respectively. Moreover, all winners received an award plaque and two-year complimentary ACM membership with a subscription to ACMs Digital Library. Winners were recognized during the closing plenary session of the MoDELS 2014 conference.
The winners selection encompassed three steps as summarized in the following.
³ For more information about the ACM SRC please refer to http://src.acm.org/ Abstract submission. To participate in the competition, students submitted a research abstract related to the main themes of the conference and describing the research problem and motivation, background and related work, approach and uniqueness, results, and contributions. Eleven contributions were submitted and a panel of experts (see Section 4) reviewed the submissions and selected seven students to participate in the second round of the competition, which was held in Miami. The abstracts that were selected and included in this document are listed below.
─ Model-Driven Engineering Meets the Platform-as-a-Service Model, Adrián Juan
Verdejo, University of Stuttgart, Germany ─ Model-Driven Design of Ensemble-Based Component Systems, Ilias Gerostathopoulos, Charles University, Czench Republic ─ Exploring Omniscient Debugging for Model Transformations, Jonathan Corley,
The University of Alabama, United States
─ Towards the Automatic Resolution of Architectural Variability in Software Product Line Architectures through Model Transformations, Jesús Benedé, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain ─ Transition from EBNF to Xtext, Jianan Yue, Nanjing University, China Poster session. It took place in Valence and students had the opportunity to present their research to conference attendees and leading experts in the software engineering fields, including the SRC committee. Judges reviewed the posters and spoke to participants about their research. The judges evaluated the research (quality, novelty, and significance) and the presentation of the research (poster, discussion) and selected students to advance to the next round of the competition.
Presentation session. Selected students continued by giving a short presentation of their research in a special session at the MoDELS 2014 conference. After each presentation, a short question and answer session occurred. Evaluations were based on the presenter’s knowledge of his/her research area, contribution of the research, and the quality of the oral and visual presentation. 3
Acknowledgements We would like to thank everyone, who has made this special event possible. We are grateful to all the students, that contributed to have a successful event, as well to Silvia Abrahao and Isidro Ramos, that as MODELS 2014 General Chairs strongly supported the event. Also to the following judges that made an excellent job in the different phases of the selection procedure: Houari Sahraoui (Université de Montréal), Klaus Havelund (California Institute of Technology), Jon Whittle (Lancaster University), Giuseppe Scanniello (University of Basilicata), Yvan Labiche (Carleton University), Harald Störrle (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet), Esther Guerra (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Juan de Lara (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Daniel Varro (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), Gianna Reggio (University of Genova), Joao Araujo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Arnor Solberg (SINTEF), Parthasarathy Madhusudan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Rupak Majumdar (MPI-SWS), Ivan Porres (Åbo Akademi University), Sanjit A. Seshia (Berkeley), Rogardt Heldal (Chalmers University) and Susanne Graf (Verimag).