EMO 2025 Awards Procedure

EMO awards will be made to recognize outstanding work in the theory and practice of evolutionary multi-criterion optimization, to include all topics covered by the EMO 2025 call for papers.

The following award procedure has been developed in accordance with statutes governing awards by the EMO steering committee.

Two awards will be conferred at EMO 2025:
  • the Outstanding Paper Award; and,
  • the Outstanding Student Paper Award.

Eligibility

  • The General Chair(s) and Program Chair(s) are excluded as potential recipients of any awards including student awards (i.e., students with either category of chair as co-authors on their papers are not eligible for an award). The Program Chair will appoint an Award Committee, who are also excluded from receiving both awards. The names of the Award Committee members will be published prior to the conference.
  • Only full papers will be eligible for either award. Furthermore, papers are eligible for either award only if at least one author registration fee has been paid and the paper is presented at the conference (either oral or poster) by one of the authors. For student papers, the student registration fee is sufficient.
  • The Outstanding EMO Student Paper is intended to recognise work principally conducted and written up by a student (or students). At the time of submission, authors shall indicate whether they wish their paper to be considered for a student award and to confirm it is eligible for such an award by completing a declaration. Work with significant contributions from non-student co-authors other than supervisory comments should be marked as ineligible by the authors at the time of submission. Reasonable checks will be made for papers marked as eligible. Students may have completed their studies by the time of award; they must all be registered students at the time of paper acceptance.
  • All other papers shall be deemed eligible for the non-student award by default (except papers excluded from both awards by virtue of authors being the Program Chair, General Chair, or acting on the award committee).

Nomination and Decision Making

  • Peer reviewers will be invited on the conference referee form to indicate if a paper should be considered as an outstanding paper award recipient (student or main), and to provide a sentence justifying the choice. The rubric on the form will state: “As a rule of thumb, it is perfectly ok to nominate no papers for an outstanding paper award, or to nominate one or two, from the sample you are kindly refereeing; nominating more than two would suggest you are being too generous”. If there are no nominations for a category, there will be no award given for that category.
  • Before the conference commences, the awards committee will convene a meeting to consider all the candidate papers for the two awards - that is, all papers that have at least one nomination from the referees (there may be an initial pre-screening by the program chairs if the number of candidates is too large).
  • By agreement, or failing agreement by breaking ties by an internal vote, the committee will decide on the outstanding paper (from the nominations) in the two categories. The decision will be based on the professional judgment of the committee; it will not be based on counting nominations from referees. If the committee finds no paper is of outstanding quality for a category, then no award will be given for that category.
  • It follows from the above that decisions will be based solely on the quality of the full paper, and not on the quality of the presentation (either poster or oral).
  • The result will be sent to the Program Chairs for ratification.

Announcement and Closure

  • The result will be announced during the conference and recognized with a certificate (for each co-author if required) and cash award (to be shared among the co-authors). The cash amount associated with each award will be notified closer to the conference. The disbursements will be processed shortly after the conference.
  • The result will be published on the EMO 2025 website, and main EMO conference series website, shortly after (within 1-2 days) after the award announcement.