Doctoral SymposiumASE 2021

Please note, due to COVID-19, the Symposium is likely to have “virtual” attendance option and hence PhD students from all over the world can participate without travelling to Melbourne

Call for Papers

The goal of the ASE 2021 Doctoral Symposium is to provide a supportive and stimulating forum in which the Ph.D. students and recent Ph.D. graduates have an opportunity to present and discuss their research with other researchers in the ASE community. The symposium aims at providing students and early-career researchers (recent Ph.D. graduates) useful guidance and feedback on their research and to facilitate networking within the scientific community by interacting with established researchers and with their peers at a similar stage in their careers. Moreover, it gives them an opportunity to promote visibility of their research within the vibrant part of the academic community.

The technical scope of the symposium is that of ASE. Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium after they have settled on a dissertation topic with some initial research results. The ASE 2021 Doctoral Symposium is open to Ph.D. students at any stage of their research, whereby students at the initial stage (e.g., first or second year) will be able to challenge their ideas and current research directions, while students at a later stage (e.g., third or fourth year) will be able to present their preliminary results and get advice for improvement and for better exposition of their contributions and conclusions. Moreover, we also welcome early-career researchers (who recently finished their Ph.D.), offering them a platform to discuss their future research direction, giving them feedback on a research project they might plan to submit, or research group they might plan to establish. As explained below, the symposium has three paper categories for early and late-stage students, and recent Ph.D. graduates.

Evaluation

The Doctoral Symposium Committee will select participants using the following criteria:

• Relevance of the research plan to the Automated Software Engineering
• Novelty, technical soundness and potential implications of the proposed research
• For later stage proposals, soundness and appropriateness of its evaluation (plan)

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.

Submission

All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at the time of submission, to the ACM proceedings format, available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). This is the same format as the research track.

Submissions must be submitted electronically through the ASE 2021 HotCRP submission site.

The doctoral symposium foresees three types of submissions:

• Early-stage PhD students (2 pages of text+one page of references only)
  
• Late-stage PhD students (4 pages+one pages of references only)
  
• Recent PhD graduates (2-4 pages of text+one page of references only).
  

Important note: differently from the research track, Doctoral Symposium papers are NOT double-blind, and therefore must contain the author’s name.

Part 1: Research Abstract

The research abstract must conform to the ASE 2021 formatting and submission instructions and should cover all of the following:

• The research problem statement, with proper motivations
• A brief discussion on the state-of-the-art
• An outline of the proposed approach or solution
• The expected contributions of the dissertation research
• Progress that has been made so far in solving the stated problem
• The methods that are or will be used to carry out the research
• A plan for evaluating the work and presenting credible evidence to the research community
• (For later stage students) a very brief outline of the evaluation results
• References to relevant publications (if any) of the submitter (appeared, accepted, submitted)

Students at the initial stage of their research might have some difficulty in addressing some of these instructions, but should make the best attempt. The research abstract should include the title of the work, the submitter’s name, a one-paragraph summary in the style of an abstract for a regular paper, and a text body that covers the points above.

A paper for a doctoral symposium typically describes the work of a single author and shall not have any coauthors. During the submission process, the system will additionally ask the students for the name of the advisor(s), contact information, and a link to the submitter’s academic web page.

The deadline for submitting the research abstract is July 16th, 2021; notifications are expected on August 16th, 2021

Part 2: Recommendation Letter (optional)

In addition to the research abstract, students are suggested to provide a recommendation letter from their Ph.D. advisor. This letter should include the student’s name and a candid assessment of the current status of the dissertation research and an expected date for dissertation submission. The recommendation letter should be in PDF, and sent to the co-chairs with the subject “ASE 2021 DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM RECOMMENDATION” at TBA