Call for Submissions – WSDM 2015 Doctoral Consortium
Doctoral Consortium submissions due: September 19, 2014

The WSDM 2015 Doctoral Consortium will provide doctoral students with a unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with experienced 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 work (and their research career) with experienced researchers in the area of Web Search and Data Mining who are members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee (they are also called “mentors”).
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 Feb 2, the same day as the Tutorials. The format will include student presentations with plenary discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers, discussions over lunch and breaks, and panel discussions regarding research career.
Candidates for the Doctoral Consortium will be selected based on the
potential of their research for future impact on the field of Web Search and Data Mining and the likely benefit to the student of participating in the Consortium. 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.

This selection will be based in part on a written paper, singly authored by the student. For students who are selected to participate in the Consortium, an updated version of the submitted paper will be published in the WSDM Conference Proceedings.

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

Submission Guidelines

The submitted paper (up to five pages) will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium. It should include:

Motivation for the proposed research.
Background and related work (including key references).
Description of the proposed research, including main research questions.
Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate).
Description of results which have already been obtained for the proposed research.
Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Consortium.
In addition, a one page appendix to the paper should be included to describe benefits that would be obtained by attending the Consortium. It should include:

A statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Consortium.
A statement by their advisor 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 the ACM Web pages on the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.



Note: An updated version of the Doctoral Consortium submission (excluding the appendix), will be published in the WSDM Conference Proceedings. Consortium submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wsdm2015
Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee.

Key dates

September 19, 2014 - Doctoral Consortium submissions due
November 21, 2014 - Notification of decisions
December 19, 2014 - Camera-ready version is due
February 2, 2015 - Doctoral Consortium at WSDM 2015
Co-Chairs

Chengxiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Tie-Yan Liu, Microsoft Research (China)