Doctoral Symposium

The ASE'04 Doctoral Symposium seeks 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 with researchers in the ASE community in a constructive atmosphere. Specifically, the symposium aims to:

- provide a setting whereby students receive feedback on their research and guidance on future directions
  from a broad group of advisors,
- foster a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research, and
- contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events.

The 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 the ASE conference.

The Doctoral Symposium will be held on September 20th, two days before the main conference. Selected students will present their work and receive constructive feedback from a panel of advisors and other Doctoral Symposium students. Note that advisors of student presenters will not be allowed to attend their student's presentations. In addition to scientific matters, students will have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of completing a PhD and performing research as a young professional in automated software engineering.

The Doctoral Symposium has the same scope as the main conference. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- Automated reasoning techniques
- Category- and graph-theoretic approaches
- Component-based systems
- Computer-supported cooperative work
- Configuration management
- Domain modeling and meta-modeling
- Human computer interaction
- Knowledge acquisition
- Maintenance and evolution
- Modeling-language semantics
- Ontologies and methodologies
- Open systems development
- Program understanding
- Re-engineering
- Reflection and metadata approaches
- Requirements engineering
- Reuse
- Software architectures
- Software design and synthesis
- Software visualization
- Testing
- Tutoring, help, documentation systems
- Verification and validation

Submission Details

To apply for participation at the symposium, you should submit an abstract of your doctoral work to the symposium organizers (see below). Only electronic submissions will be accepted. All submissions must be
in either PDF or PS. Abstracts should not exceed 4 pages in the IEEE conference-proceedings style and should:

- clearly identify the research question you are addressing,
- outline the significant problems in the field and the current solutions,
- present the preliminary ideas and state the proposed approach clearly, and
- present the applicant's contributions and results achieved so far.

In addition, your dissertation advisor should provide a (short) letter (possibly e-mail) of recommendation. The letter must include an assessment of the current status of your thesis research, and an expected date for
dissertation submission.

Submissions will be reviewed by the symposium organisers and selected for inclusion in the symposium on the basis of originality, technical merit, presentation quality, and relevance to the conference topics. Each accepted abstract will be included in the conference proceedings.

Financial Support

Scholarships to cover some or all costs associated with attending the symposium may be available for some or all participants. 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.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission : May 7, 2004
Notification of acceptance : June 4, 2004
Camera-ready paper due : July 2, 2004
Symposium Presentations : September 20, 2004

Doctoral Symposium Organizers

Tom Ellman
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 USA
Phone: (845)-437-5991
Fax: (845)-437-7498
Email: ellman@cs.vassar.edu

Andrea Zisman
Department of Computing
City University, Northampton Square
London EC1V 0HB, UK
Phone: +44 (0)20 7040 8346
Fax: +44 (0)20 7040 8587
Email: a.zisman@soi.city.ac.uk