Doctoral Symposium

Goal and Scope


The Doctoral Symposium aims to create a forum for PhD students working on foundations, techniques, methods and tools in the area of global software engineering. It will provide participants with an opportunity to present and to discuss their research with senior researchers of the global software engineering community in a constructive and friendly atmosphere.

Specifically, the symposium aims to:

Provide a forum whereby students receive constructive feedback from other researchers on their research and guidance on future directions.
Provide students with a forum for building a network of other PhD students as well as with more senior researchers.
Assist PhD students to practice writing clearly and to effectively present their research proposal.
Assist students in the selection of an adequate research methodology for their PhD work.
Build bridges for potential research collaboration(s).
Contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers at the main conference.
The Doctoral Symposium is intended for students who have not yet completed their dissertation research and do not expect to write up their dissertation before the conference. Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium, after having settled on a dissertation topic and having obtained initial research results.

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.

The Doctoral Symposium has the same scope of technical topics as the main ICGSE conference.


Submissions

To apply for participation at the symposium, you should prepare a submission package consisting of the two parts listed below.

Part 1: Research proposal (3 pages in ICGSE format and submitted as a PDF file) submitted by email to Prof. Claes Wohlin ( firstname.lastname@bth.se):

Your name and contact information (you and dissertation advisor)
Title of your research
Research area and sub-area of your work
Brief description of your research proposal indicating the problem addressed and approach taken (if defined) – abstract maximum 100 words
Description of the research problem and its importance in the field - introduction
Description of the research issue/focus – research objective
Brief survey of background and related work, as well as current solutions/approaches – related work
Detailed description of proposed methodology – research method
Results achieved so far (if any) - results
The expected contributions of your research – expected results
Description of research evaluation methods and your plan to present evidence of contribution to knowledge in the research community – evaluation
Students at relatively early stages in their research may have some difficulty addressing all these areas in detail; this is understood.

Part 2: Letter of Support (from your research advisor), submitted by email to Claes Wohlin.

The letter must include your name and an assessment of the current status of your thesis research and stage in the doctoral program, as well as an expected date for dissertation submission.


Evaluation

Submissions will be reviewed by symposium chair and members of the doctoral symposium committee and selected for inclusion in the symposium on the following criteria:
• Quality of the research proposal (research problem, hypothesis and methodology)
• Relevance to conference topics
• Quality of proposal presentation
• Diversity of background, research topic and approach
• Stage of research (students will be selected across a range of research stages)

Presentation and publication of research proposal


Symposium participants are expected to present their proposal during the symposium, as well as prepare and present a poster about their proposal during the poster session at the conference . The 3-page proposal will be included in the second volume of the conference proceedings. Registration at the conference is required for the proposal to be printed in the proceedings.


Doctoral Symposium Committee Chair


Claes Wohlin, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden


Doctoral Symposium Committee

• Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University, USA
• Sirkka Jarvenpaa, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Jürgen Münch, Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Germany
• Rini van Solingen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands


Important Dates


Deadline for submission: March 14, 2011
Notification of acceptance: April 25, 2011
Camera ready due: May 30, 2011
Symposium presentation: Aug 16, 2011