Every year, NIPS selects a small number of papers to receive the Best Student Paper Award. The goal of this award is to promote excellence in student research, and to acknowledge some of the most outstanding work published at NIPS.

For a paper to be eligible, at least fifty percent of the research reported in the paper must be performed by one or more student authors, and the student must agree to present the paper at the Conference. The awards are selected by a subcommittee of the program committee shortly before the Conference. The selection is based on the quality, originality, and clarity of the submission and its expected future impact. A list of winners in previous years follows:

NIPS 2012 Awards -- Sponsored by Machine Learning

Outstanding Student Paper Awards

Po-Ling Loh and Martin Wainwright
No voodoo here! Learning discrete graphical models via inverse covariance estimation

Robert Gens and Pedro Domingos
Discriminative Learning of Sum-Product Networks

Honorable Mentions

Clément Calauzènes, Nicolas Usunier, and Patrick Gallinari
On the (Non-)existence of Convex, Calibrated Surrogate Losses for Ranking

Borja Balle Pigem and Mehryar Mohri
Spectral Learning of General Weighted Automata via Constrained Matrix Completion