IISE data analytics & Information Systems (dais) Division Best Student Paper Competition

The Data Analytics & Information Systems (DAIS) Division of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE) announces the DAIS Track Best Student Paper Award to recognize the excellence of its student members. The award brings prestige to the DAIS Division as well as to the recipients honored.

Four finalists will be selected to make oral presentations at the 2026 IISE Annual Conference from May 16-19, 2026. All finalists will receive an award certificate. The Best Student Paper Award will be presented at the town hall meeting of the DAIS Track during the 2026 IISE Annual Conference & Expo in Atlanta.

Eligibility Requirements

The award nominee must be a student member of IISE and the DAIS division.
The student should be the first author of the submitted paper. Moreover, a formal, signed statement by the student's advisor should be submitted along with the paper affirming that 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 topic should fit the DAIS themes. The paper must present original research results and CANNOT be accepted for publication elsewhere at the time of submission.
The submitted paper MUST follow the paper formatting guidelines and requirements of IISE conference proceedings.
Previous finalists who wish to compete again should submit an entirely different paper. However, past winners are not eligible for the competition as the first author.
The finalists will be announced before the conference and will present their papers in the session of the DAIS Best Student Paper Competition at the 2026 IISE Annual Conference & Expo
Papers considered for this competition MAY NOT be simultaneously submitted to other competitions at the 2026 IISE Annual Conference & Expo

Application/Submission Process

Paper format: follow the paper formatting guidelines and requirements of IISE conference proceedings. The submitted papers must follow the format or will be returned without review.
Submission: To enter, please submit one blinded and one unblinded version of the paper and a formal signed statement by the student’s advisor, all in electronic format (PDF files ONLY), with subject “DAIS Best Student Paper Competition” to the 2025 contest coordinators:
- Hairong Wang
- Jobish Vallikavungal Devassia
- Yan Li no later than January 18, 2026 (conference paper submission deadline). Late or incomplete submissions will not be eligible.
If you have any questions, please send an email (with subject “DAIS Best Student Paper Competition 2026”) to the coordinators.

Evaluation Process

Each eligible paper will be reviewed by two-three external referees, each of whom will assign a numerical score using the following five criteria. For each criterion, an integer score between 1 and 5, with 5 being the highest rating, will be assigned.

Originality
Depth and completeness of the work
Significance
Organization and quality of writing
Relevance to DAIS (importance of the problem and its impact on the practice of DAIS)

Important Notes

Papers submitted for this competition will NOT be published in the IISE conference proceedings.
IISE and the DAIS division do NOT own the copyrights of the papers submitted for this competition.

Important Dates

Full paper submissions are due January 18, 2026
Notifications to Finalists February 27, 2026
Speaker registration deadline: March 8, 2026

Recognition Process

The first, second, and third-place winners will receive a certificate provided by IISE and will be recognized at the DAIS division town hall meeting.
The first, second, and third-place winners will be acknowledged in the DAIS Division newsletter.
If the award is sponsored, then it needs to follow the IISE policies and procedures for that process.

Committee Chairs

Submissions should be sent to the committee chairs:
Hairong Wang
Jobish Vallikavungal Devassia
Yan Li

For more information, please contact Amy Straub.

Conflict of Interest Policy

Societies and divisions must follow standard conflict of interest guidelines. Those guidelines include, but are not limited to:
Officers and Board members of the S/D should be ineligible for awards during the period of their service, without approval by the Senior VP for Technical Operations (SVP). Exceptions may only be made by the SVP when awards are time sensitive (i.e., a Student Best Paper Award for a Student Board Member, when the student is graduating), and the impacted board member(s) or officer(s) must recuse themselves from the award process. For awards that are not time-sensitive, the nominee should wait until their Officer or Board service is complete to be nominated.
The awards committee (or judging committee) should not include members who have either a personal or professional relationship with the nominees. For example, a faculty member should not be judging a paper competition where a student from the same university is a nominee for best student paper award.
The awards committee (or judging committee) should actively change its membership on a rotating basis from year to year to ensure fairness, equity, and diversity. That is, some members of the judging committee should roll off the committee and new members should roll on.

Note, it is a best practice to document the procedures and policies of the award committee(s) for transparency.

2025 Winner

1st Place
Michael Ibrahim (Georgia Institute of Technology), Nagi Gebraeel (Georgia Institute of Technology), Heraldo Rozas (University of Chile), and Weijun Xie (Georgia Institute of Technology).
"A Federated Distributionally Robust Support Vector Machine via Mixture of Wasserstein Balls Ambiguity Set for Distributed Fault Diagnosis"

2024 Winner

1st Place
Xinchao Liu, Dzung Phan, Youngdeok Hwang, Levente Klein, Kyongmin Yeo, and Xiao Liu
Georgia Institute of Technology
"Optimal Sensor Allocation for Emission Source Detection with Linear Atmospheric Dispersion Processes"

Past Winners

DAIS Division Page