Call for Doctoral Symposium Papers

Keynote Speaker – Professor Brian Fitzgerald

Prof Brian Fitzgerald is the Director at Lero and holds an endowed professorship, the Frederick A Krehbiel II Chair in Innovation in Global Business & Technology, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he was also Vice President Research from 2008-2011. He is Principal Investigator in Lero and was Founding Director of the Lero Graduate School in Software Engineering. His research interests, i.e. primarily in software development, encompassing development methods, Global software development, agile methods and open source software.

Goal and Scope

The goal of the ESEC/FSE 2019 Doctoral Symposium is to create a forum for PhD students working in the area of software engineering. Participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their doctoral research with senior researchers in the software engineering community, in a constructive and friendly atmosphere. Specifically, the symposium aims to:

Provide a setting whereby students receive feedback on their doctoral research and guidance on future directions from the Doctoral Symposium Panel;
Foster the creation of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research; and
Contribute to the conference goals through the interaction between the Symposium participants and other researchers at the main conference.

In addition to scientific matters, students will have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of completing a PhD and performing research as a young professional in software engineering. Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium after they have settled on a dissertation topic with some initial research results. Students should be at least a year from completion of their dissertation (at the time of the Symposium). The Doctoral Symposium has the same scope of technical topics as the main ESEC/FSE conference.

Important Dates

All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h).

Deadline for Doctoral Symposium papers submission: 23rd April 2019
Authors notification: 17th June 2019
Deadline for camera-ready paper: 1st July 2019

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: Note that the official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ESEC/FSE 2019. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submission

To apply as a student participating in the Doctoral Symposium, you should prepare a submission package consisting of two parts, both of which must be submitted by the submission deadline.

Part 1: Research proposal (4 pages conforming to the ACM Conference Format ). The proposal should cover:

Research problem you are targeting and its importance to the field;
Brief survey of background and related work;
Description of the proposed approach or solution;
Expected contributions of your research;
Results achieved so far;
Plan to evaluate your work;
Plan to present evidence of contribution to knowledge in the research community.

The research proposal should be submitted through the ESEC/FSE submission web site here, in a single PDF document.

At the time of submission all papers must conform to the ESEC/FSE 2019 Format and Submission Guidelines, and must not exceed four (4) pages in this format, including all text, references, appendices, and figures; submissions that do not comply with these requirements will be summarily rejected by the Chairs without review. The research proposal should be single-authored and include the title of your research, your name, your advisor, your email address, and a short summary in the style of an abstract for a regular paper.

All submissions must be original work, and must not have been previously published, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (see also ACM policy and procedures with respect to plagiarism).

Part 2: Letter of Support Please ask your research advisor to submit a letter of recommendation in support of your application. This short letter must include your name, the start date of your PhD studies, an assessment of the current status of your dissertation research, and an expected date for dissertation submission. The letter must come directly from your advisor’s email address and should be sent in PDF format to the Symposium Chairs (Tracy Hall: t.hall3@lancaster.ac.uk ; Barbara Russo: brusso@unibz.it) with the subject: “ESEC/FSE 2019 Doctoral Symposium support letter for [student name]”.

Evaluation

The Doctoral Symposium Panel will select participants using the following criteria:

Quality of the research proposal and its relevance to ESEC/FSE;
Quality of proposal presentation.

Research proposals of students who are invited to present their work at the Symposium will be included in the conference proceedings.

Acceptance

All authors of accepted contributions will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions. Authors must register for the ESEC/FSE 2019 Doctoral Symposium and present their work at the Symposium. Authors will also have the possibility to present a poster during the poster session of the main conference.

Doctoral Symposium Chairs

Tracy Hall (Lancaster University, UK)
Barbara Russo (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)

Doctoral Symposium Committee

Nour Ali, Brunel University London, UK
Francesca Arcelli Fontana, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy
Gabriele Bavota, University of Lugano, Switzerland
David Bowes, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Filomena Ferrucci, University of Salerno, Italy
Daniel German, Victoria University, Canada
Lech Madeyski, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland
Austen Rainer, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Federica Sarro, University College London, UK
Carolyn Seaman, University of Maryland, USA

Contact

Questions regarding the Doctoral Symposium should be directed to the Symposium chairs:

Barbara Russo, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy barbara.russo@unibz.it
Tracy Hall, Lancaster University, UK
t.hall3@lancaster.ac.uk