Doctoral SymposiumECSA 2023

The Doctoral Symposium (DS) aims to provide a supportive setting for PhD students to present their research and receive feedback and guidance. Each PhD student will be matched with an establish expert in the field. This expert will provide support the student, provide feedback on the student’s research and offer advice on managing his/her research.

The symposium will consist of two main parts: (1) a symposium session of half day or full day depending on the number of accepted submissions) and a social gathering (lunch or dinner).

Dedicated symposium session. During this session PhD students can present their work and interact with established researchers in the field about their ongoing research and plans for the future. The symposium will also help participants to establish a network with their peers in the field of software architecture. The program will feature a keynote that will shed light on the particular challenges of doing PhD research in the field of software architecture.

Social gathering with PhD students and the matched experts. During this event the students and experts can interact in an informal way, reflect on the symposium session, chat about research and being researcher, and careers.

The technical scope of the Doctoral Symposium is that of ECSA 2023, as represented by the list of the topics in the ECSA 2023 call for papers. We encourage submissions from PhD students at any stage of their research.

Submissions

To participate at the Doctoral Symposium, a submission paper needs to be submitted by the submission deadline consisting of two parts: a research summary paper and a letter of recommendation. The summary research paper should be authored by the student as a sole author.

Research summary paper (5 -five- pages)

The research summary paper should cover the following aspects:

• The research problem to be solved and its relevance in the software architecture field;
• A discussion of related work with an explaining why the research problem has not been solved yet;
• The scientific methods used to tackle the research problem;
• An outline of the proposed solution;
• The expected results;
• A plan for the evaluation of results;
• A critical reflection on the work, including open questions and challenges that the PhD student meets in his/her work, and that can be discussed with the senior colleagues.

The submitted paper will be evaluated by the Doctoral Symposium Committee and the following selection criteria will be used:

• The originality of the proposed research, the novelty of the research approach, and relevance to ECSA;
• The technical quality of the submission, including clarity, precision, and adequacy of the problem statement and critical reflection of the work, in relation to the PhD student’s study stage.

Letter of Recommendation (maximum 1 -one- page)

A recommendation letter that should be written by the advisor(s). The letter should include the name of the candidate, an appreciation of the PhD research, the status of the research, and an expected date for the dissertation submission.

Submission

The research summary paper with the letter of recommendation that is added to the paper in a common PDF file should be submitted electronically via the ECSA-2023 submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecsa2023

Proceedings

ECSA 2023 will use a two-step process. Online proceedings (available before the start of the conference) will include accepted papers to the companion proceedings and will be published online on the ECSA 2023 web page (i.e. no formal proceedings). The accepted papers will be accessible only by the ECSA 2023 workshop participants.

After the conference, students with more mature results in their PhD will be invited to extend their paper to at least 12 and maximum 16 pages to be included in the ECSA 2023 companion volume to be published at LNCS post-proceedings (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs). For the post-proceedings, the papers will undergo a minor revision cycle where the extensions will be checked by the DS chairs. Paper registration is required, allowing the inclusion of the paper in the proceedings. The student must present the paper during the conference.

Important Dates

• Research Summary and Letter Recommendation Submission: 30 June 2023
• Author Notification: 28 July 2023
• Camera-ready version: 28 July 2023

Note: All deadlines are 23:59h AoE (anywhere on Earth).

Track Chairs

• Muhammad Ali Babar,University of Adelaide, Australia (https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/ali.babar)
• Danny Weyns, KU Leuven, Belgium (https://people.cs.kuleuven.be/danny.weyns/)