Doctoral SymposiumCAIN 2026

This year, CAIN will again include a Doctoral Symposium, providing students with the opportunity to receive rich feedback on their PhD work related to the CAIN themes of Software Engineering applied to AI and Data Science (for details on the topics, please refer to the page “CAIN Scope”). Students may submit single-author extended abstracts (don’t include supervisors’ names as co-authors) of early-stage ideas or late-stage work for review by the Doctoral Symposium Committee.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions should be accompanied by an endorsement letter from their advisor, including the assessment of the current status of the research and an expected date for the completion of the dissertation. For the early PhD category, the submissions should be 2 pages long, with one additional page permitted for references only. The submissions should clearly state:

• the problem to be solved in the student’s research (justify why this problem is important),
• the state-of-the art on why the problem is novel and covers a research gap (make clear that previous research and related work has not yet solved this problem),
• the research hypothesis or claim,
• the expected contributions of the research and their novelty,
• the plan for evaluating the contribution and presenting credible evidence of the results to the community.

For the late PhD category, the submissions should be 4 pages long, with one additional page permitted for references only. We welcome and encourage this type of submission for students that submitted in previous years in the early PhD category (if so, the submission should clearly show the progress since previous years). The submissions should include the bulleted items above, as well as:

• a description of the results achieved so far (including publications), and
• the planned timeline for completion.

Research and experience papers should be submitted to HotCRP.

By submitting to CAIN, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. The authors also acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM and the authorship policy of the IEEE.

Submissions must conform to the official ACM Primary Article Template, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers). To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document: \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

Accepted submissions will be presented at the main conference via a poster and/or short presentation, depending on availability (likely on Sunday, April 12th). We will host a dedicated session for students with accepted submissions to give a more detailed presentation and receive expert feedback (likely on Monday, April 13th, after the keynote). The submissions may, at the review committee’s discretion, be published in the CAIN 2026 proceedings.

Regarding the CAIN 2026 proceedings:

1. “The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM or IEEE Digital Libraries. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.”
2. “Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed”.

Authors of all accepted submissions are required to register for the CAIN 2026 conference.