All Ph.D. students have to satisfy the qualifying requirements during each year of their graduate program. Qualifying requirements will be quantified in terms of points that students will acquire by completing activities that will help them to both complete their Ph.D. and improve their curriculum. Activities belong to blocks. In the next sections, we describe them.

1. Complete 3000 points each year.
2. At least one sixth of the points must come from the Math block.
3. At least one quarter of the points must come from progress in the thesis.
4. Students can try to complete each activity as many times as they want, but if they fail, they will have to generate material related to the topic before trying to attempt the test again.
5. Points are cumulative, that is, unused points gained during one period count towards the next period.

The first block of activities consists of showing competence in topics related to the program. The evaluation will vary for each topic; for example, for theoretical topics, the evaluation will be a written test. The amount of points that each topic gives is as follows:

The bibliography and type of evaluation for each topic can be found in this repository.

Once a student has shown competence for a topic, then she can teach a course on it for the same amount of points.

• 3000 points for a publication as first author in JCR journal in the 1st and 2nd quartiles.
• 3000 points for a publication as first author in top conference (see list of conferences).
• 1500 points for a publication as first author in JCR journal in the 3rd quartile.
• 1500 points for a publication as first author in a medium conference (see list of conferences).
• 700 points for a publication as first author in JCR journal in the 4nd quartile.
• 700 points for a publication as first author in a small conference (see list of conferences).
• Points not as main author count one fifth of the points as first author.
• Points as first author count as thesis points.

2000*(0.tp) points for reaching a top tp percentile in Kaggle competitions.

• 800 points for implementing the main ideas of the thesis.
• 400 points for implementing the state of the art systems/algorithms with which the results of the thesis will be compared.
• 200 points for writing each chapter of the thesis. (see proposed format)
• Publications related to the thesis count as thesis points.
• Knowledge topics strongly related (determined by advisor) to the thesis.