Doctoral SymposiumICSE 2026

Call for Papers

The ICSE Doctoral Symposium (DS) provides doctoral students an opportunity to present and discuss their research goals, methods, and results with senior researchers in the software engineering community, in a constructive and friendly atmosphere.

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.

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: November 14, 2025
• Notification of acceptance: December 5, 2025
• Camera-ready copy of abstract due: Jan 26, 2026
• Doctoral Symposium: during conference week

Who should participate

Participating students will have the unique opportunity to describe their research ideas, plans, and (if applicable) results to experienced software engineering researchers outside the student-advisor relationship, and receive comments and suggestions from them. This could be useful at all stages of the PhD journey. For example, early-stage students can practice articulating their research problem or area they are targeting and argue for its importance to the field. And they can get guidance on how to design an appropriate research plan tackling that problem. Similarly, late-stage students can practice weaving a common thread through their dissertation work, and their job talk pitch.

Typical participants in the Doctoral Symposium are neither “too early” nor “too late” in their PhD journey. That is, they have settled on a research area or thesis topic, but have not yet defended their thesis at the time of the event.

How to prepare your submission

We expect submissions to be extended abstracts in PDF format that conform to the ICSE 2026 formatting guidelines, except that they should not be anonymized. Doctoral Symposium submissions must not exceed three pages, including references.

Your submission must be single-authored and include:

• The title of your research / future dissertation;
• Your name, affiliation, and email address;
• Your advisor (if you have one); and
• Your PhD year at the time of the symposium (e.g., year 3 out of expected 5).

The main body of your submission is expected to contain:

• A description of the research problem or area you are targeting and an argument for its importance to the field;
• A few pointers to the most relevant related work or background;
• (If applicable) A summary of your own prior research in this area and key results;
• A description of your proposed approach for the planned research yet to be done;
• The expected contributions of your research; and
• An evaluation plan for the stated contributions. It is expected that submissions from earlier-stage students will be lighter on their own prior research and results compared to later-stage students.

Submit via https://icse2026-ds.hotcrp.com

Evaluation

The Doctoral Symposium chairs will select participants based on the quality of the extended abstract, the quality of the proposed research plan, and the relevance of the research to the ICSE community.

Attending

All students with accepted abstracts must register for the ICSE 2026 Doctoral Symposium.

All students with accepted abstracts will be invited to present a poster during the ICSE conference. In addition, a subset of the students with accepted abstracts (selected by the chairs) will have the opportunity to present their work in person 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.

The two-page accepted abstracts (with one additional page permitted for references only) will appear in the ICSE companion proceedings.

Contact

For questions regarding the Doctoral Symposium, please contact the ICSE DS 2026 chairs Sabrina Marczak marczak.sabrina@gmail.com and Bogdan Vasilescu vasilescu@cmu.edu.