Program Committee member for IEEE BigData 2026 High School Symposium
Program Committee member for the IEEE BigData 2026 High School Symposium, reviewing three student papers against a standard set for high school research.
Serving on the Program Committee of the High School Symposium at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2026), held on 17 December 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. The symposium gives high school students a venue to present original research in data mining and related areas: machine learning, deep learning, big data systems, and their applications. The first author must be a high school student. Papers run to five pages and are judged on technical quality, novelty, relevance, and clarity. It is chaired by Kunpeng Liu of Clemson University and Huazheng Wang of Oregon State University.
I am reviewing three submitted papers, with reviews due 6 October 2026.
Reviewing here calls for a different standard from a main conference track. The work is judged on the quality of the thinking rather than against professional research: a clear question, a reasonable approach, and honest analysis of what the results show, weighed against what can be expected at this level. That is not a lower bar so much as a different one, and a paper without a coherent research question or a sound method still warrants rejection. For many of these authors it is their first experience of peer review, so the useful output is specific, constructive guidance on how to improve the work, not a score.
This is separate from my Technical Program Committee role on the main IEEE BigData 2026 conference.
