Students are encouraged to submit their papers to the EMBEC17&NBC17 Young Investigators Competition (YIC) or Student Poster Competition (SPC). The paper should satisfy the EMBEC17&NBC17 Author Guidelines paper submission requirements and submitted by the paper submission deadline. Each paper which is accepted for the YIC or SPC should be presented by the primary author, who must be a student, and registered for EMBEC17&NBC17. Each registered student can participate to the YIC or SPC with only one accepted paper. The paper submissions should contain original, high quality, not submitted or published elsewhere research work. Papers should strictly follow the format of 4-page papers specified by the organizers. All accepted 4-page papers will be included in the proceedings of EMBEC17&NBC17.

Students working towards their Masters or PhD degree are encouraged to participate in the YIC or SPC. Students need to be under the age of 35 years old on the 1st day of the EMBEC17&NBC17 conference.

YIC/SPC is an excellent opportunity for personal leadership and strong involvement of students in a prospective scientific/technical activity. It gives the possibility for all participants, students, counselors, professors and many others to be involved and to participate in such an important and interesting student activity.

Papers should cover technical and engineering aspects of a subject related to the themes specified at the conference website. The work need not be original in engineering content, but should be original in treatment and concise in coverage of the author’s contribution to the subject.

IYC submissions will be reviewed in the usual manner by the Conference Editorial Board for their suitability to be included in the technical program of the Conference. The accepted papers will be reviewed by the YIC/SPC Committee to short-list the 10 Finalists for IYC and 15 Finalists to SPC. The nomination by faculty advisors is a very important document here (remember it must be received by April 20th, 2017).

The following evaluation and review guidelines will be given to the YIC/SPC Committee:

Please use a percentage numerical score from 0%-100% to evaluate a paper. In addition to the numerical score, you could provide a technical review of up to 1 page, like a review you would do for journals by assessing the scientific merit of the paper and the student’s contribution to the work. Your detailed expert review comments would be most useful to the committee.

Please use the following four main criteria to review the paper – each suggests some areas you might want to look into. The relative weighting of each area is shown in %. We need an overall % score for the paper – in order to try and calibrate the scores – aim such that anything > 90% is a world leading research paper.

Q1. Is the scientific contribution of the work to the field real and identifiable? (35%)

•  Is the contribution evident from the paper?
• What of the scientific rigour?
• Is it of interest to the broader community of biomedical engineering?

Q2. What is the technical quality of the paper? (35%) – Is there a good introduction to the problem and rationale for the study?

•  Is the solution logically developed?
• Is there a solid literature review placing this work in context?
• Is the methodology concise yet descriptive?
• Are the results clearly shown?
• Is the discussion section appropriate, logical and are the conclusions well defined?

Q3. From the paper and nomination, how would you rate the contribution from the student author? (20%)

•  Is the students’ contribution clearly visible?
• Where would this sit in comparison to the students’ peer’s work?

Q4. Is the paper formatted and put together well (10%)

• Is the spelling and grammar OK?
• Are the figures and tables appropriate, legible and necessary?
• Are figure captions complete?
• Are the references complete and do they strike the right balance (well defined references and not too much self-referencing)?

The winners will be selected based on the technical merits of the work, professionalism of the presentation (oral for IYC, poster for SPC), and verbal communication skills.