The ASE'01 Doctoral Symposium is intended to bring together PhD students working on foundations, techniques, tools and applications of automated software engineering and give them the opportunity to present and to discuss their research in a constructive and international atmosphere. The goals of the symposium are:

• To provide a setting for mutual feedback on participants' current research, and guidance on future research directions
• To develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research
• To contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events.

The Doctoral Symposium will be held before and during the main conference. We will spend the day before the conference, on November 25, in a one day symposium where selected students each present their work and receive constructive feedback from a panel of advisors and other Doctoral Symposium students. The symposium will also include invited talks on topics relevant to the process of completing a PhD and writing a Dissertation. Job search issues will be discussed with informal evening sessions to address both academic and industrial job expectations. During the conference itself, the symposium participants will run a plenary panel session. This session will include a brief summary of the work presented at the Symposium. It will then invite an open discussion session in which the normal rules of a panel session are reversed: students participating in the Symposium will pose questions to the audience, to seek advice on various aspects of completing a PhD and performing research as a young professional in automated software engineering.

The ASE'01 Doctoral Symposium has the same scope as the main Conference. Topics include but are not restricted to:

• Automated reasoning techniques
• Automated software specification
• Automated software design and synthesis
• Category and Graph - theoretic approaches
• Computer-supported cooperative work
• Domain modeling and meta
• modeling
• Human computer interaction
• Knowledge acquisition
• Maintenance and evolution
• Model checking
• Modeling language semantics
• Ontologies and methodologies
• Process and workflow management
• Program understanding
• Reasoning in the presence of Inconsistency
• Re-engineering
• Reflection- and Metadata approaches
• Requirements engineering
• Reuse
• Software architectures
• Testing
• Tutoring, help, documentation systems
• Verification and validation

To apply for participation at the symposium, you should submit an abstract of your doctoral work to the symposium organizers. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. All submissions must be in PDF. Abstracts should be less than 3000 words, and should:

• Clearly identify the research question you are addressing,
• Outline the significant problems in the field of research and the current solutions,
• Present the preliminary ideas and state the proposed approach clearly, and
• Present the contributions of the applicant and the results achieved so far.

In addition, you should provide a letter of recommendation from your dissertation advisor. The letter must include an assessment of the current status of your thesis research, and an expected date for dissertation submission. The Doctoral Symposium is intended for students who have not yet completed their dissertation research, and do not expect to write up their dissertation before the conference. If you are already writing your dissertation, or expect to be substantially done by the time of the Symposium, we encourage you to submit your work as a full paper to a future ASE conference. Note that advisors of student presenters will not be allowed to attend their student's presentations.

Submissions will be reviewed by the Doctoral Symposium advisors panel, and selected for inclusion in the symposium on the basis of originality, technical merit, presentation quality, and relevance to the conference topics.

Admission is limited to 10 students. However, all students submitting abstracts will be invited to attend the Symposium and participate in discussions. A Poster Session is planned for the main conference. If you are selected to present at the Symposium, you should also prepare a poster about your thesis work. You will be given the opportunity to display and discuss the poster during the conference. A Doctoral Symposium Proceedings will be provided that will include accepted papers.

Travel scholarships may be available for some or all participants contingent on the availability of funding. Quality of the submitted work will be a factor in allocating any scholarships. All student participants will receive free registration, and will be expected to work the registration tables during the conference in return.