Goals

The 2009 Doctoral Symposium and PhD Student Workshop provides a forum for both early and late-stage PhD students to present their research and get detailed feedback and advice. The main objectives of this event are:

1. to allow PhD students to practice writing clearly and to present effectively their research proposal
2. to get constructive feedback from other researchers
3. to build bridges for potential research collaboration
4. to contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers at the main conference.

The 19th edition of the Doctoral Symposium and PhD Workshop will be held as part of ECOOP 2009, Genova, Italy. As the name suggests, this is a two-session event: a Doctoral Symposium and a PhD Students Workshop.

Please be advised that AITO has once again generously offered to subsidize the travel costs for attendees.

Event Format

This is a full-day event of interactive presentations. Morning and early afternoon will be dedicated to the Doctoral Symposium, with late afternoon dedicated to the PhD Workshop. Besides the formal presentations, there will be plenty of opportunities for informal interactions during lunch and (possibly) dinner. It is planned that, like in 2008, members of the academic panel will give short presentations on a variety of topics related to doing research.

Important Dates

If accepted for presentation, the student's advisor must email the chair no later than June 30th and confirm that the advisor attended at least one of the student's presentation rehearsals.

Call For Papers

Potential topics are those of the main ECOOP'09 conference, i.e. all topics related to object technology including but not restricted to:

• Architecture, Design Patterns
• Aspects, Components, Modularity, Separation of Concerns
• Collaboration, Workflow
• Concurrency, Real-time, Embeddedness, Mobility, Distribution
• Databases, Persistence, Transactions
• Domain Specific Languages, Language Workbenches
• Dynamicity, Adaptability, Reflection
• Frameworks, Product Lines, Generative Programming
• HCI, User Interfaces
• Language Design, Language Constructs, Static Analysis
• Language Implementation, Virtual Machines, Partial Evaluation
• Methodology, Process, Practices, Metrics
• Model Engineering, Design Languages, Transformations
• Requirements Analysis, Business Modeling
• Software Evolution, Versioning
• Theoretical Foundations, Formal methods
• Tools, Programming environments

Doctoral Symposium

The goal of the doctoral symposium session is to provide PhD students with useful feedback towards the successful completion of their dissertation research. Each student is assigned an academic panel, based on the specifics of that student's research. The student will give a presentation of 15-20 minutes (exact time will be announced later), followed by 15-20 minutes of questions and feedback. The experience is meant to mimic a "mini-" defense interview. Aside from the actual feedback, this helps the student gain familiarity with the style and mechanics of such an interview (advisors of student presenters will not be allowed to attend their student's presentations).

To participate, the students should be far enough in their research to be able to present:

• the importance of the problem
• a clear research proposal
• some preliminary work/results
• an evaluation plan

The students should still have at least 12 months before defending their dissertation. We believe that students that are defending within a year would not be able to incorporate the feedback they receive.

To participate, please submit:

• a 3-4 page abstract in the llncs format.
• a letter from your advisor. This letter should include an assessment of the current status of your dissertation research and an expected date for dissertation submission. The advisor should e-mail this letter to Stephen Nelson.

Abstracts should be sumbitted to:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dsecoop09

The abstract should focus on the following:

1. Problem Description

   • what is the problem?
   • what is the significance of this problem?
   • why the current state of the art can not solve this problem?

2. Goal Statement

   • what is the goal of your research?
   • what artifacts (tools, theories, methods) will be produced, and how do they address the stated problem? How are the artifacts going to help reach the stated goal?

3. Method

   • what experiments, prototypes, or studies need to be produced/executed?
   • what is the validation strategy? How will it demonstrate that the goal was reached?

Note that this is not a typical technical paper submission, and that the focus is not on technical details, but rather on research method.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the committee.

Phd Students Workshop

This session is addressed primarily to PhD students in the early stages of their PhD work. The goal is to allow participants to present their research ideas and obtain feedback from the rest of the workshop attendees. Each participant will give a 10-15 minute presentation, followed by 10-15 minutes of discussions (exact times will be announced later).

To participate, please submit:

• 6-10 page position paper in the llncs format, presenting your idea or current work;
• a support letter from your advisor. The advisor should e-mail this letter to Stephen Nelson.

Position papers should be sumbitted to:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dsecoop09

The position paper should contain (at least):

• a problem description;
• a detailed sketch of a proposed approach;
• related work.

As this is earlier-stage research, it is not necessary to have concrete results from this research presented in the paper. Instead, the goal of the paper is to inform the reader of a (well-motivated) problem and to present a high level (possible) solution.

Committee

• Kuljit Kaur Chahal, Guru Nanak Dev University, India
• Brian Chin, UCLA, US
• Eduardo Figueiredo, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
• Eduardo Guerra, Aeronautical Institute of Technology, Brazil
• Alex Holkner, RMIT University, Australia
• Niklas Mellegard, IT-universitetet i Göteborg, Sweden
• Nikolas Nehmer, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
• Stephen Nelson (chair), Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
• Adrian Rutle, Høgskolen i Bergen, Norway

Academic panel: TBA

Previous Experiences

Eduardo Figueiredo, participant DS ECOOP'08

Eric Bodden, participant DS ECOOP'07