PROMISE'12
The 8th International Conference on Predictor Models in Software Engineering
Sep 21-22, 2012, Lund, Sweden: http://promisedata.org/2012/

(Co-located with ESEM 2012)

IMPORTANT DATES:
Abstracts due: March 26, 2012
Submissions due: April 2, 2012
Author notification: May 14, 2012
Camera ready copy due: June 11, 2012

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Martin Shepperd, Brunel University

ABOUT:
This international conference seeks repeatable methods for building
verifiable models, useful for implementation, evaluation, & management
of software development projects (both in general or for specific
domains like telecom, finance, scientific applications, etc).

THEME:
The theme of PROMISE'12 is the next generation of empirical SE
(next-gen). While we encourage submission of the traditional style of
PROMISE papers, we also seek "next gen" papers that extend this area
in significant new directions (see "kinds of papers" below)

TOPICS:
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Effort prediction models
* Defect prediction models
* Meta-analysis and generalizations of predictive models exploring
certain questions
* Replicated studies
* Predicting various intermediate or final outcomes of interest
regarding business, team, human, people, process, and organizational
aspects of software engineering
* Privacy and ethical issues in sharing and modeling
* Qualitative research guiding and informing the process of building
future predictive models
* Instance-based models predicting outcomes by examining similarities
to past experiences
* Industrial experience reports detailing the application of software
technologies - processes, methods, or tools - and their effectiveness
in industrial settings.
* Tools for software researchers that effectively gather and analyze
data to support reproducible and verifiable research.

KINDS OF PAPERS:
This conference encourages both standard papers and next-gen papers
(and note that only next-gen papers can be submitted for consideration
to the special journal issue associated with this conference).

Standard papers focus on prediction systems; e.g. L learners applied
to D data sets in some M*N cross-val. For an excellent examples of
L*D*M*N studies, see TSE pre-prints and the papers by Hall et al.
http://goo.gl/XRWuk (for defect prediction) and Dajaeger et al.
http://goo.gl/UNO4E (for effort prediction). For such standard papers,
we strongly discourage results based on

- just a few data sets in domains where many data sets are available
available in the PROMISE repository;
- tiny effects sizes: e.g. an MMRE improvement of 10% when in data
sets where the MMRE can range up to 10,000%;
- the "broken" PROMISE data sets (see comments at http://promisedata.org/?p=30).

Next-gen papers focus on all the issues that surround predictive
models. For discussions on next generation predictive modeling see (a)
the ICSE'11 tutorial on Empirical SE, version 2.0 at
http://goo.gl/MWzlq; or (b) the "Special Issue Notes" at
http://goo.gl/b3E05. Issues relevant to next-gen papers include, but
are not restricted to the following:

+ Before a predictive model is built:
++ Privacy concerns of the individual and the corporate must be addressed.
++ Training data data quality must be assessed : see http://goo.gl/QE5au.
+ When building a predictive model:
++ It is important that the tools are run correctly, as discussed in
http://goo.gl/qtc9o;
+ After the predictors are built:
++ Prediction systems could be used in decision making for project
managers (e.g. as done in http://goo.gl/AIqC4 or http://goo.gl/y7Agm).

DATA:
PROMISE'12 will give the highest priority to empirical studies based
on publicly available datasets. It is therefore encouraged, but it is
not mandatory, that conference attendees contribute the data used in
their analysis to the on-line PROMISE data repository. The repository
currently holds 142 data sets, which can be used to
repeat/confirm/refute/improve previous results.

SPECIAL ISSUE:

Papers accepted to PROMISE'12 may also be submitted to a forthcoming
special journal issue on "Empirical Software Engineering, version
2.0".
Authors with good reviews from PROMISE'12 are strongly encouraged to
submit to this special issue since several reviewers used for
PROMISE'12 will also review papers for this issue. It is a requirement
for all submissions to the special issue to have some section called
"Empirical SE, V2.0" that discusses next gen issues; i.e. how their
work fits into the broader picture beyind just building a predictor
(see notes, above).

The venue for that special issue is TBD. Previous PROMISE special
issues have appeared in IEEE Software, the Empirical Software
Engineering Journal, and the Information and Software Technology
Journal.

SUBMISSIONS:

* Submissions must be original work, not published or under review elsewhere.
* Submissions must conform to the ACM SIG proceedings templates from
http://goo.gl/wE1k.
* Papers must not exceed 10 pages (including references).
* Papers should be submitted to via Easychair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=promise2012.
* Accepted papers will be published in the ACM digital library.

ORGANIZATION:

Steering Committee:

Ayse Bener, Ryerson University, Canada (i-Promise)
Tim Menzies, West Virginia University, USA (General Chair)
Burak Turhan, University of Oulu, Finland (Publicity Chair)
Stefan Wagner, University of Stuttgart, Germany (PC Chair)
Ye Yang, Chinese Academy of Science, China (Proceedings Chair)
Du Zhang, Sacramento State University, USA (Local Organization Chair)

Programme Committee:

Lefteris Angelis, University of Thessaloniki
Ayse Bener, Ryerson University
David Bowes, University of Herfordshire
Daniela da Cruz, University of Minho
Bojan Cukic, West Virginia University
Bernd Fischer, University of Southampton
Harald Gall, University of Zürich
Dragan Gašević, Athabasca University
Greg Gay, University of Minnesota
Tracy Hall, Brunel University
Mark Harman, University College
Rachel Harrison, Oxford Brookes University
Jacky Keung, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Rainer Koschke, University of Bremen
Ken-ichi Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Thilo Mende, University of Bremen
Tim Menzies, West Virginia University
Leandro Minku, University of Birmingham
Sandro Morasca, University of Insubria
Tom Ostrand, AT&T
Massimiliano di Penta, University of Sannio
Daniel Rodriguez, University of Alcalá
Alessandra Russ, Imperial College
Alessandro Sarcia, University of Rome
Martin Shepperd, Brunel University
Burak Turhan, University of Oulu
Stefan Wagner, University of Stuttgart
Laurie Williams, North Carolina State University
Ye Yang, Chinese Academy of Science
Du Zhang,Sacramento State University
Hongyu Zhang, Tsinghua University
Tom Zimmermann, Microsoft