Call for Doctoral Symposium papers

Goals and scope

The goals of the ESEC/FSE 2011 Doctoral Symposium are to provide PhD students with feedback that will help them towards the successful completion of their dissertation research. The Doctoral Symposium also seeks to support the students in the development of their natural scientific curiosity and to facilitate their networking within the scientific community.

Specifically, the Symposium will:

provide the traditional Doctorial Symposium review and mechanism through which students will be able to present their dissertation research to the Doctoral Symposium Panel and receive comments as well as guidance on future directions;
solicit interaction between and among students and with more senior researchers at the main conference, also by cooperation with the PhD Working Groups track (see the PWG call for participation); and
foster the creation of longer term proactive community of young researchers imbued with a shared collaborative research spirit.

The Doctoral Symposium is open to Ph.D. students at any stage of their research, whereby students at the initial stage (first or second year) will be able to challenge their ideas and current research directions, while students at a more mature stage (third or fourth year) will be able to present their thesis and get advice for improvement and for better exposition of their contributions and conclusions.

The scope of the Doctoral Symposium covers all ESEC/FSE 2011 Research topics.

How to submit

Prospective participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than four (4) pages, following the same format and guidelines of the ESEC/FSE 2011 research track, see details at: http://2011.esec-fse.org/cfp-research-papers

Submissions will be handled through Easychair. The submission site URL is:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esecfseds2011

It is expected that the abstract will be authored by the PhD student alone, and that it will describe the problem addressed by his/her research, with reference to the state of the art in the field, the proposed approach, and the student's contributions and results so far obtained. Submissions should cover aspects of the student’s work that have not previously been published elsewhere and which are not currently submitted for review elsewhere. The abstract should also specify the student's and advisor's name, affiliation and contact information, and the current list of any publications either appeared, accepted or submitted for which the student is an author.

Where the student has no such other publications this should be indicated for clarity. The reason we ask for this is to provide context to the reviewers. All submissions will be reviewed on their own merits and students should not infer that a list of prior publications is in any way expected or required; we welcome submissions from students for whom this will be their first formal submission as well as those who have previously published.

In addition, the primary dissertation advisor must provide a concise (and informal) letter of support by email to the Doctoral Symposium chairs. The letter must state when the student began their Ph.D. studies, include an assessment of the current status of the research, and give an expected date for dissertation submission. The recommendation letter must arrive no later than one (1) week after the submission deadline.

Submissions will be reviewed by the Symposium Panel and selected on the basis of technical merit, presentation quality, and relevance to the conference topics. Students whose submission is accepted are to present their research at the Symposium. The selected abstracts will be included in the conference proceedings that will be published by ACM.

Students of the accepted abstracts must register and attend ESEC/FSE 2011. They are strongly encouraged to also apply to the PhD Working Groups (PWG) program. The PWG program has a separate Call for Participation which is available from the FSE website.

Important Dates

Abstract submission date: April 3, 2011
deadline extended to April 17, 2011 (23:59:59 Apia time)
Notification date: June 3, 2011
Camera ready date: July 5, 2011
Doctoral Symposium Presentations: September 5th, 2011