Anyone finishing a cluster/classification dissertation might be interested in the following award competition: Bill Shannon Presiden-Elect, Classification Society The Classification Society Distinguished Dissertation Award supported by Chapman and Hall/CRC The Award will be for the best PhD (or approximately equivalent doctoral) dissertation nominated by an annual deadline. The theme is clustering, classification, related areas of data analysis, encompassing both associated theory and/or applications. The Award is administered by the Classification Society (CS). An evaluation committee is set up by CS to evaluate the nominated theses. This committee should have between 3 and 5 members. The chair of the committee is appointed by the CS President. The committee is selected by the committee chair, in conjunction with the CS President, and is approved by the CS Board. In 2008-2009, the evaluation committee is: Samantha Prins (Committee chair, Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics, James Madison University), Fionn Murtagh (Science Foundation Ireland; and Dept. of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London), Douglas Steinley (Dept. of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia) and Rebecca Nugent (Dept. of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University). Members of the evaluation committee must declare any potential conflict of interest. A member of the evaluation committee cannot play any role in regard to evaluating his/her own PhDs, nor also in regard to nominations where there has been a direct collaborative link (e.g. through joint publications). Nominations will be through the evaluation committee chair. It may be useful to have printed copies sent to committee members, but in any case web-accessible versions have to be made available. The evaluation panel may seek one or two external referee reports for each nominated dissertation. Typical criteria for nomination for the Award include: (i) the most innovative or impressive work in theory/methodology, or the most innovative or well developed application(s); and (ii) the literature review has to be thorough. Nominations are to be received by 1 January each year, from the author (PhD), their advisor/supervisor, or other related person. Nomination includes the name and contact points, an online copy of the dissertation, and a short description of why the dissertation merits the award (see above). A decision is made by the evaluation committee by 1 April. The evaluation committee can recommend one award; an award and a runner-up; two joint winners; or other combinations if they think it appropriate. For the next submission deadline, 1 January 2009, nominated PhDs have to have been successfully completed in the 2008 calendar year. Awards are ratified by the CS Board. Publicity is made in the CS and other newsletters, and on relevant websites. The short-list of nominated dissertations will also be openly published. For non-English language theses, it is requested to provide an extended abstract, and (where relevant) pointers to papers associated with the thesis that have been published. In 2009 the Award totals US$500 in book vouchers from Chapman and Hall/CRC. The winner will be invited to make a presentation in a special plenary session at the CS Annual Meeting. Up to $500 of the Award winner's travel expenses to the Annual Meeting will be covered by CS. Contact for information and nominations: prinssc (at) jmu (.) edu CS: http://www.classification-society.org/csna [[alternative HTML version deleted]]