Appel: ESWC 2014, Call for PhD Symposium

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 15:45:57 +0100 (CET)
From: speroni at cs.unibo.it
Message-Id: <20131118144618.31DD6DBB6F at vina.cines.fr>
X-url: http://2014.eswc-conferences.org/important-dates/phd-symposium


** apologies for cross-posting **

==== Call for PhD Symposium ====
http://2014.eswc-conferences.org/important-dates/phd-symposium

The ESWC 2014 PhD Symposium is a chance for PhD students working in all
areas of Semantic Web research to present their work, meet with peers
and experienced researchers, obtain feedback and learn from each other's
experiences. It aims at helping future researchers in building up the
skills and confidence required to conduct and promote their research, as
well as providing them with an opportunity to attend one of the most
important research conferences on the Semantic Web.
 
The ESWC PhD Symposium will give to students the opportunity to:

1. Learn from a mentor: Established researchers and PhD student advisors
   will provide direct feedback. Each selected student will be assigned
   a member of the programme committee with whom they will interact on
   the revision of the paper and the preparation of the presentation.
2. Learn about research in general: Doing good research goes beyond
   writing a good paper; it includes perspectives on research as an
   endeavour and a career. Besides the presentations, coffee breaks and
   the PhD Symposium lunch will be used to exchange ideas and ask
   questions about all aspects of conducting a PhD and a research career
   in general.
3. Learn by constructive criticism: Thinking and writing about strengths
   and weaknesses of other research contributions shapes your own
   research capabilities.  As a participant to the PhD symposium, you
   will be expected to also review submissions from others, allowing you
   to juxtapose and learn from convergence and divergence of opinions.
4. Learn by presenting: Accepted contributions will be presented in the
   PhD symposium. All accepted contributions will also appear at the
   general poster session of ESWC. Students' posters will be presented
   alongside posters and demonstrations of the main conference.
 
Submissions will be considered from two different categories depending
on the advancement into the PhD:

- Early Stage PhD: For students who may have identified the main
  research problem they want to address, the relevant literature, and
  are building their research methodology, but might not yet have
  obtained significant results, or only preliminary ones.
- Late Stage PhD: For students who have already defined their approach
  (even if incompletely) and obtained significant results (e.g., that
  might already have been published).

These categories do not affect the chances of being selected. They will
however be taken into account by reviewers in their feedback, and in the
length and format of the presentation. The organisers might decide to
move a submission from one category to the other, if they think it is
justified.

*Submission Information*

PhD students in all areas of Semantic Web research are invited to submit
papers having 5 to 10 pages describing their PhD research, in the PDF
format following the LNCS template. Submissions should be sent using the
PhD Symposium submission system, through which participants will be also
asked to decide on the category of their submission and to write a
paragraph regarding their motivation for participating in the ESWC PhD
Symposium.
 
Submissions should follow the following template of sections:
 
1. Introduction/Motivation
   Give a general introduction to the domain/area/topic and indication
   of its importance/impact in Semantic Web research or other domains.

2. State of the Art
   Describe existing work in the area, work focusing on the same/similar
   problems or that might be useful to realising your PhD.  

3. Problem Statement and Contributions
   Based on motivation and state of the art, formulate the problem you
   intend to solve, and how you intend to contribute to Semantic Web
   research. This section should include a clear formulation of one (or
   very few) research hypothesis (what you will validate through your
   methodology, approach and evaluation) and the research questions that
   need to be answered. Late Stage PhD submissions should focus on
   contributions to such a hypothesis.

4. Research Methodology and Approach
   Describe the research methodology you will apply in your research,
   including the different steps from the formulation of your research
   questions to answering them. Also describe the approach you are
   taking (or you intend to take for Early Stage PhD submissions) to
   instantiate the research methodology, hence contributing to solve the
   problem described in Section 3 and confirm or reject your
   hypothesis. Discuss how this approach is innovative and novel, and
   how it is (might be) implemented.

5. Preliminary or Intermediate Results
   In a full conference paper, the approach would be fully described (in
   section 4) and fully evaluated (in section 6). Being at an
   intermediate stage, you should report here about the results achieved
   up to now in applying your approach that might not yet be sufficient
   for a full evaluation. .  

6. Evaluation Plan
   Describe your evaluation plan, which is the way you intend to
   validate your hypothesis, your results, and the value of your
   approach. For Early Stage PhD submissions, this might be only
   partially defined, and details might be ommited. For Late Stage PhD
   submissions, you might have partial evaluation results.

7. Conclusion  
   Describe how your results will or might impact research or the world
   at large.


*Important dates*
 
Submission deadline: 13th January 2014
Notification: 10th February 2014
Revised version of submission to mentor: 24th February 2014
Final version: 10th March 2014
Draft presentation to mentor: 12th May 2014


*PhD Symposium Chairs*

Steffen Staab (Institute for Web Science and Technologies - WeST,
University of Koblenz-Landau, DE)
Mathieu d'Aquin (Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK)