SiLA Award

Call for Entries: Best Laboratory Automation Thesis Award

We invite submissions for the inaugural Best Laboratory Automation Thesis Award. This prize recognizes a bachelor’s, master’s or diploma thesis that has made a significant technical, practical or conceptual contribution to laboratory automation using the SiLA 2 standard.

Purpose

  • Promote research and development that advances interoperability, modularity and automation in laboratory environments
    through SiLA 2.
  • Support and recognize excellent student work that demonstrably improves laboratory workflows, device integration, software tooling, standards adoption or reproducibility.

Who may apply

  • Graduates and current students at universities and comparable higher-education institutions.
  • Eligible theses: bachelor’s, master’s or diploma theses completed within the last 24 months prior to the submission deadline that have not yet received this award.

Eligible topics (examples)

  • Development of SiLA 2 device servers, clients or middleware components.
  • Tools for automatic generation, testing or validation of SiLA 2 interfaces (e.g., code generators, simulators, test harnesses).
  • Integration of SiLA 2 with laboratory information management systems (LIMS), electronic lab notebooks (ELN), robotics or scheduling systems.
  • Case studies, deployments or performance evaluations that demonstrate improved interoperability, robustness or reproducibility using SiLA 2.
  • Contributions to documentation, onboarding materials, teaching resources or community adoption strategies for SiLA 2.

Evaluation criteria

Submissions will be evaluated by an international panel of experts according to the following criteria:

  • Relevance and innovation: How substantially does the thesis advance SiLA 2-based laboratory automation?
  • Technical quality: Soundness of design and implementation, correctness and reproducibility.
  • Practical impact: Demonstrated benefits in real or realistic laboratory environments, ease of integration, and potential for adoption.
  • Documentation and dissemination: Quality of documentation, test artefacts, examples, and availability of source code or artefacts (preferably under an open-source license).
  • Clarity: Quality of writing, presentation and argumentation.

Prize

  • A monetary award and a certificate. The monetary award can be raised depending on the fulfillment of technical milestones.
  • Opportunity to present the work at a partnering symposium or workshop (virtual or in-person).
  • Public recognition in the awarding institution’s communications and on the SiLA community channels.

Monetary Award

  • The basic monetary award is 1,000 €.
  • If the software associated with the thesis is publicly available under an OSI-approved open-source license (e.g., MIT, Apache 2.0 or BSD-3), the award is raised by 1,000 € and the thesis is eligible for the following further milestones:
    • User documentation
    • Basic test code coverage
    • CI/CD pipelines including build, test (if applicable) and static application security testing (SAST)
    • Dynamic Application Security testing

Proprietary licenses for software related to case studies do not prohibit the open-source milestone if the core (reusable) software components are available as open source.

  • Fulfillment of each of the milestones above raises the monetary award by 500 €. Hence, a maximum of 4,000 € is possible.
  • After the award is announced, the applicant of the awarded thesis has 6 weeks to fulfill more milestones and hence, increase the monetary award.

Submission process and deadline

Selection timeline

  • Shortlisting: within 6 weeks after the deadline.
  • Final evaluation and award decision: within 10 weeks after the deadline.
  • Award announcement: approximately 12 weeks after the deadline.
  • After the award is announced, the award winner has 6 weeks to complete missing milestones to increase the monetary award.

Intellectual property and licensing

  • Ownership of the thesis remains with the author(s). By applying, applicants grant the organisers permission to publish the title, abstract and the authors’ names in relation to the award.
  • Applicants are encouraged to release software and artefacts under an open-source licence; however, closed-source submissions are accepted with explanation of constraints.

Contact and inquiries

  • For questions about eligibility or submission, contact the SiLA office: info@sila-standard.org
  • For technical questions about SiLA 2 relevance, you may include a brief description of the implementation when contacting the committee.

Diversity and inclusion

  • We welcome submissions from all regions and backgrounds. Selection is based solely on the scientific and technical merits of the work.