Doctoral SymposiumICSE 2024

Call for Submissions

The ICSE Doctoral Symposium (DS) provides doctoral students an opportunity to interact with their colleagues working on foundations, techniques, tools, and applications of software engineering.

The goals of the symposium are to:

• Provide the participants independent and constructive feedback on their current research and future research directions;
• Develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research; and
• Provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community.

Who should participate

Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium if they are at least nine months away from completing their dissertation at the time of the event, but after having settled on a research area or thesis topic.

Submission categories

There are two submission categories:

• Early PhD submissions. These are aimed at students in the early stages of their PhD, who have already settled on a research area but have no publications that are core to their PhD and who are looking for early feedback on how to continue their PhD. Accepted submissions outlining the topic of the PhD dissertation will appear as two-page summaries in the proceedings. Students will be invited to present a poster at the symposium and may have the opportunity to give a short talk to the symposium attendees, depending on the available time.

• Late PhD submissions. These are aimed at students who already have results that they wish to present at the symposium. Accepted submissions outlining the topic of the PhD dissertation and the obtained results will appear as four-page summaries in the proceedings. Students will be invited to present a poster at the symposium and to give a talk to the symposium attendees and advisory committee.

Submissions

Each student’s Doctoral Symposium submission consists of two elements:

1. A short paper describing the student’s dissertation research. This paper submission has to be authored by the student only. The Doctoral Symposium does NOT require submissions to be double-anonymized for the review.
2. A letter of recommendation from (one of) the student’s dissertation advisors. The letter should be sent by e-mail to icse2024-ds@googlegroups.com. The letter of recommendation must include an 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:

• a) the problem to be solved in the student’s research (justify why this problem is important and make clear that previous research and related work has not yet solved that problem),
• b) the research hypothesis or claim,
• c) the expected contributions of the research,
• d) 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. The submissions should include the items (a) to (d) above, and:

• e) a description of the results achieved so far, and
• f) the planned timeline for completion.

Submissions can be made via the Doctoral Symposium submission site: https://icse2024-ds.hotcrp.com/. We encourage submitters to upload their paper early and to properly enter potential conflicts for reviewing.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Formatting

Submissions must conform to the “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 option (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers). To that end, place the following LaTeX code at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

\acmConference[ICSE 2024]{46th International Conference on Software Engineering}{April 2024}{Lisbon, Portugal}

Submissions must strictly conform to the formatting instructions. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review.

All submissions must be written in English and be made accessible to people with disabilities. Guidelines (from SIGACCESS) can be found here: https://assets21.sigaccess.org/creating_accessible_pdfs.html.

Review process

Submissions will be reviewed by members of the Doctoral Symposium Committee. Participants will be selected on the basis of their anticipated contribution to the Doctoral Symposium goals as well as the potential benefit to the participants. Among the criteria to be considered in reviewing submissions are:

• the potential quality of the research and its relevance to software engineering,
• the stage of the research (see the Section “Who should participate” above), and
• the diversity of backgrounds, research topics, and approaches.

Attendance

Authors of submissions selected for participation will have the opportunity to present their work at the Doctoral Symposium and receive feedback both from a panel of experts and from other Doctoral Symposium participants. The participants will also have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of completing a Ph.D. and performing research in software engineering. Authors will have camera-ready versions of their papers published in a companion volume to the ICSE 2024 Conference Proceedings. The authors of accepted submissions are required to register for ICSE 2024 and present their work. To facilitate detailed feedback to the participants, attendance at the Doctoral Symposium is by invitation only, limited to the participants and the Doctoral Symposium Committee. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: November 22, 2023
• Notification of acceptance: December 22, 2023
• Camera-ready copy of paper due: January 12th, 2024

Contact

If there are queries regarding the CFP, please contact the ICSE DS 2024 chairs at icse2024-ds@googlegroups.com.