Doctoral SymposiumICSE 2025

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

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.

Submit via https://icse2025ds.hotcrp.com/. Please see Submission categories and Submission Policies below.

Who should participate

PhD Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium if they are at least six 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 (with one additional page permitted for references only). 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 (with one additional page permitted for references only). 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 icse2025-ds@googlegroups.com. The letter of recommendation must state the name of the student, the name of the advisor and 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, for whom, 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://icse2025ds.hotcrp.com/. We encourage submitters to upload their paper early and to properly enter potential conflicts for reviewing, including both the conflicts of the student-author and of their supervisors.

Please ensure that you obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM and IEEE have been involved in ORCID and may collect ORCID IDs from all published authors. We are committed to improving author discoverability, ensuring proper attribution and contributing to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Formatting

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Submission Policies

• By submitting to the ICSE DS, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to ICSE 2025 DS must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for ICSE 2025 DS. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies.
• If the research involves human participants/subjects, the authors must adhere to the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Upon submitting, authors will declare their compliance with such a policy. 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.
• By submitting to the ICSE 2025 DS, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE, submission policy of the IEEE, the authorship policy of the ACM and associated FAQ. In particular, these documents includes guidance on the use of Generative AI.
• The ICSE 2025 DS is aligned with the ICSE 2025 Open Science policies. The guiding principle is that, wherever relevant, all research results, artifacts, and data should be accessible to the public. For additional guidelines, see the Open Science Policy of the Research Track and the Q&A page.
• While the student should be the sole author of the submission, indication of conflicts of interests should include both the conflicts of the student themselves as well as those of their supervisor(s) (PhD advisor(s)).

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 2025 Conference Proceedings.

The authors of accepted submissions are required to register for ICSE 2025 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 11, 2024
• Notification of acceptance: December 2, 2024
• Camera-ready copy of paper due: February 5th, 2025

Contact

If there are queries regarding the CFP, please contact the ICSE DS 2025 chairs at icse2025-ds@googlegroups.com