Computing Surveys is sponsoring an annual competition for the best student tutorial paper. The paper should be in the form of a substantive tutorial of 5000 to 12000 words that examines a topic of computer science at a level understandable by senior undergraduate students. It should conform to the standards of Surveys tutorials, combining tutorial clarity, historical and scholarly perspective, and technical interest.

Submissions will initially be judged by a panel of students who will recommend between five and ten papers to a panel selected by the Editors of Computing Surveys. The panel will select the best paper from among these for publication in Surveys and select runners-up for honorable mention. Student ACM chapters as well as undergraduate computer science departments should actively promote this competition as a way for students to develop their writing and tutorial skills.

Papers should have been written in the previous two years and should not have been previously published in commercial publications. However, papers previously published in the ACM student mazazine Crossroads or in other student publications will be accepted. The paper should be accompanied by a letter from a faculty sponsor that certifies it as the work of the author or authors and describes the circumstances under which it was written. Authors should normally be undergraduates or graduate students with less than two years of graduate school and should normally be members of the ACM, but exceptions will be considered based on letters from the faculty sponsor. International participation is encouraged, as in the student programming contest. Information on becoming a Student ACM member can be found at http://www.acm.org/membership/. Further information about the contest can be found at http://osl-www.cs.umass.edu/~cavazos/contest/. Updated information will be posted on this page periodically.

Submission for the 1999 competition are due by June 30, 1999. Students will make a recommendation to the Editors of Surveys by August 31, and the winner will be announced by October 31 and published in an issue of Surveys no later than the summer of 2000. It is desirable though not required that contestants indicate their intention to submit, with a provisional title. Submissions can be sent electronically to cavazos@cs.umass.edu, or submitted in hard copy form to:

John Cavazos
Dept of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Amherst, Mass, 01003