CALL FOR DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM SUBMISSIONS

The ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium provides doctoral students with a
unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with other
researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research.

The objectives of the Doctoral Consortium are:

- To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss
their research with experienced IR researchers: the members of the
Doctoral Consortium Program Committee.
- To provide students with an opportunity to establish a supportive
community, including other doctoral students at a similar stage of
their dissertation research.

The Consortium will take place on the same day as the tutorials (24
July), with the format including: student presentations with plenary
discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers, and
discussions over lunch and breaks.

Prospective attendees should have written, or be close to completing,
a thesis proposal (or equivalent). It is desirable that the student
is not so close to completion that the event would have little impact
on their work. Before submitting, students should discuss this
criterion with their advisor or supervisor.

Over the years, the number of submissions to the Consortium has grown
steadily; as a result, the Consortium has become increasingly
selective. Candidates for the Consortium will be selected based on
the potential of their research for future impact on the field of
Information Retrieval and the likely benefit to the student of
participation in the Consortium.

This selection will be based in part on a written paper, singly
authored by the student. One-page extended abstracts (submitted after
their selection by students who are selected to participate in the
Consortium) will be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings.

Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are permitted to have
previously published on their research, and are encouraged to submit
papers or posters to SIGIR and associated workshops.

SIGIR may be able to provide travel grants for students chosen to
attend the Consortium. Application details for travel grants will be
available on the SIGIR Web site.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The submitted paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the
Consortium. To get the most out of the discussion, it should include:

- Motivation for the proposed research.
- Background and related work (including key references).
- Description of proposed research, including main research questions.
- Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate).
- Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral
Consortium.

In addition, a one page appendix to the paper (placed after the
references) should include the following:

- A detailed statement by the student saying why they want to attend
the Consortium.

- A statement by their advisor / supervisor saying how the student
would benefit by attending the Consortium.

Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has
written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent),
and when they expect the student would defend their dissertation if
they progress at a typical rate.

FORMAT REQUIREMENTS

Submissions must be written in English and submitted in the ACM
Conference style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style). The paper
should be no more than 5 pages in length including all figures and
references, but not including the one page appendix. The first page
must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and
contact details, an abstract of up to 250 words, ACM Computing Reviews
categories, and up to 3 keywords describing the topic areas.
Information about categories and keywords can be found in ACM Web
pages on the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word
templates.

As the format for Doctoral Consortium papers follows almost exactly
that for SIGIR papers, it provides useful experience in preparing
papers for the SIGIR Conference. Note, Doctoral Consortium papers
will not be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings; only
one-page extended abstracts will be published.

Consortium submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sigirdc2011. It is the
responsibility of the student to ensure that their submissions use no
unusual format features and are printable on a standard printer.
Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium
Program Committee.

Important Dates

7 March 2011 - Doctoral Consortium submissions due
8 April 2011 - Notification of decisions
24 July 2011 - Doctoral Consortium in Beijing

Co-Chairs

Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands)
Paul Thomas, CSIRO (Australia)