Every year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) spearheads a series of Student Research Competitions (SRCs) at ACM-sponsored or co-sponsored conferences. These SRCs provide graduate (Masters or PhD program) and undergraduate students an opportunity to present one of their research projects to the conference. At ACM SIGMETRICS, the competition was held as follows. First, the students submitted an extended abstract to a program committee that selects a subset of the abstracts that will be presented at the conference. A few of these posters were selected for an oral presentation. Participating students have the opportunity to win cash prizes. In each category (graduate and undergraduate), the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners receive prizes of 500, 300, and 200, respectively. Additionally, first-place undergraduate and graduate student winners from the SRCs held during the year are invited to present their work at the SRC Grand Finals, where a different panel of judges evaluates these winners against each other.
Su et al. (Fri,) studied this question.