DS - Doctoral SymposiumICSE 2021

The ICSE 2021 Doctoral Symposium is a one-day event to be held on May 21 and 24, 2021 in Madrid, Spain. The symposium provides doctoral students an opportunity to interact with their colleagues working on foundations, techniques, tools, and applications of software engineering.

The goals of the symposium are to:

• provide the participants independent and constructive feedback on their current research and future research directions;
• develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research; and
• provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community.

Accepted Papers

Call for Doctoral Symposium Submissions

Who should participate

Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium if they are at least nine months away from completing their dissertation at the time of the event, but after having settled on a research area or thesis topic.

Submission categories

There are two submission categories:

• Early PhD submissions. These are aimed at students in the first years of their PhD, that have no publications that are core to their PhD and that are looking for early feedback on how to continue their PhD. Accepted submissions will appear as two page summaries in the proceedings, students will be invited to present a poster at the symposium and may have the opportunity give a short talk to the symposium attendees depending on the available time.
• Late PhD submissions. These are aimed at students that are in their last years of their PhD and that have results that they wish to present at the symposium. Accepted submissions will appear as four page summaries in the proceedings, students will be invited to present a poster at the symposium and to give a talk to the symposium attendees.

Submissions

Each student’s Doctoral Symposium submission consists of two elements:

1. A letter of recommendation from the student’s dissertation advisor. The letter should be sent by e-mail directly to the Doctoral Symposium Chairs (svegas@fi.upm.es and s.uchitel@imperial.ac.uk). The letter of recommendation must include an assessment of the current status of the research and an expected date for the completion of the dissertation.
2. A short paper describing the student’s dissertation research. This paper has to be authored only by the student.
   
   For late PhD submissions, the paper should be 4 pages long (two more pages containing only references are permitted) and should clearly state:
   1. the problem to be solved in the student’s research; justify why this problem is important and make clear that previous research and related work has not yet solved that problem,
   2. the research hypothesis or claim,
   3. the expected contributions of the research, including a discussion of related work,
   4. how the student plans to evaluate the results and to present credible evidence of the results to the community,
   5. a description of the results achieved so far, and
   6. the planned timeline for completion.
   
   For early PhD submissions, the paper should be 2 pages (one more page containing only references is permitted) and should include all items above from (a) to (d) and not include (e) nor (f).

Submissions can be made via the Doctoral Symposium submission site (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icse2021ds). We encourage submitters to upload their paper early and to properly enter potential conflicts for reviewing.

Formatting

For formatting instructions instructions, see the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTEX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option).

Review process

Submissions will be reviewed by members of the Doctoral Symposium Committee. Participants will be selected on the basis of their anticipated contribution to the Doctoral Symposium goals as well as the potential benefit to the participants. Among the criteria that will be considered in reviewing submissions are:

• the potential quality of the research and its relevance to software engineering,
• the stage of the research; see the Section “Who should participate” above, and
• the diversity of backgrounds, research topics, and approaches.

Attendance

Authors of submissions selected for participation will have the opportunity to present their work during the Doctoral Symposium and to have a camera-ready version of their papers published in a companion volume to the ICSE 2019 Conference Proceedings and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Selected participants will receive feedback both from a panel of experts and from other Doctoral Symposium participants. The participants will also have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of completing a PhD and performing research in software engineering.

To facilitate detailed feedback to the participants, attendance to the Doctoral Symposium is by invitation only, limited to the participants and the Doctoral Symposium Committee.

Important Dates

• DS Submissions Deadline: 19 November 2020
• DS Acceptance Notification: 18 January 2021
• DS Camera-Ready: 12 February 2021
• DS Presentations: 24 May 2021