One of the goals of ESAC is to encourage students
in the field of EMC to perform and present their research at our
annual IEEE EMC Symposium. For our purposes, student papers must
have a student as its primary author; the student should have
accomplished all of the research, and professors, other faculty
and joint authors (if any) play only an advisory role. For a student
paper to be accepted for the Symposium, it must meet the same
standards and criteria as the rest of the regular papers submitted.
All accepted student papers are automatically considered for the
prestigious Best Student Paper award conducted and administered
by the ESAC.
Once the Symposium committee receives the full paper, a copy is
forwarded to the ESAC. ESAC in turn sends copies to three different
evaluators. These individuals have varied backgrounds and are
selected provided there is no conflict of interest present. They
include the following: a Ph.D. in an engineering organization
with electromagnetics background, a professor with electromagnetics
background, and an EMC test laboratory manager. The papers provided
to the evaluators are “sanitized” in order to conceal
the author’s identity and affiliation, etc. The evaluation
factors used are the same as those used to accept the regular
papers; however, additional factors are used: innovation, advancement
and contribution to the field of EMC, potential applications,
and usefulness of the problem/solution addressed. Each team member
evaluates and ranks the paper independently of the other two members.
An ESAC volunteer then adds the scores and identifies the winner.
In the case of a tie or close points, a second evaluation is made
among the top three to five candidate papers, and then the winner
is declared. The evaluators may be requested to provide justification
of their rankings if needed. Once the points are tabulated, the
winning paper number is matched with the author’s name and
the winner’s details are provided to the EMCS Awards committee
for certificate preparation. Since the students are expected to
come to the Symposium and present their papers, the winning student
is notified during the Symposium. If you have any questions or
suggestions to improve the process, please contact me at maqsood@ieee.org.
EMC
