Call for Doctoral Symposium Papers

The SPLC Doctoral Symposium aims to provide a supportive environment that enables doctoral students to get constructive feedback on their research. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their work with experienced members of the community. Thus, the symposium offers a unique opportunity to gather valuable expert feedback and to get in touch with peer students in the same field. The event is dedicated to PhD students who are approximately in the second year of their candidature. The SPLC doctoral symposium covers the same research topics as the main conference. The focus shall be on presenting a big picture of the PhD research including initial results and open issues.

Submissions/Publishing

Requirements

To participate, students should prepare a research plan answering the following questions:

  • The research problem being addressed and its importance
  • The research methodology and techniques being applied
  • The solution being proposed, its novelty and validity
  • The relation of the work with the state of the art

The idea of the research plan is to provide clear material that can be used as a basis for guidance and discussion. Therefore, students should think about the above points carefully and try to make their ideas as concrete and clear as possible. Students at relatively early stages of their research may find it difficult to address some of these points, but should still attempt to do their best. It is strongly recommended that students discuss the research plan with their supervisors.

The following structure is recommended:

  • Front matter: Title, your name, email address, abstract
  • Introduction and Motivation: Introduction to the area of study; description of the problem tackled and its importance; what the literature says about this problem and where existing work fails; how you plan to tackle this problem; what results you envision; how you plan to validate your solution.
  • Research Questions: Clearly state the research questions you plan to address and any assumptions you make.
  • Research Methodology and Approach: The research methodology you plan to use (e.g., design science, action research), including the techniques you plan to employ in your research (e.g., formalization, algorithm specification, case studies). In accordance with your research methodology, describe your research approach: what novel methods and/or technology you are going to build, how you are going to do that, including aspects such as data collection, software prototyping and evaluation. Discuss any threats to validity you can envision and you expect them to address (to the extent possible).
  • Preliminary Results: Overview the key results you achieved so far. Provide an example to explain how the solution obtained so far works – this is very important!
  • Work plan: Outline the structure of your thesis, distinguishing the work accomplished so far from that remaining, including a publication plan. Also provide a detailed work plan for the next 12 months.

Submissions should be 4 pages  (+2 pages with references only). All  submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and must not contain or  cite proprietary or confidential material.

Submissions must adhere to the latest ACM Master Article Template: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template.

Latex users should use the “sigconf” option, so they are recommended to use the template that can be found in “sample-sigconf.tex”. In this way, the following latex code can be placed at the start of the latex document to create a double column layout:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}
 
\acmConference[SPLC'23]{27th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference}{August 28--September 1, 2023}{Tokyo, Japan}

The SPLC proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

The research plan should be sent as a single file via Easychair. Submissions will be evaluated by two reviewers according to relevance, originality and feasibility of the described research.

The author of the accepted submission must pay a full registration fee for the submission to be published. SPLC 2023 is primarily a physical event and papers are expected to be presented on site, except where no co-author is able to attend SPLC 2023 in Tokyo. If any co-author of a paper is attending physically, they will need to present the paper. If no co-author is able to come to Tokyo to present an accepted paper, we ask that you let us know for which paper no co-author is able to present in-person. Such remote presenters will be accommodated for presenting online, live where feasible or else via a recording in exceptional circumstances.

Format of the Symposium

The symposium will be held in conjunction with SPLC 2023. Each participant will get a chance to present their work and get feedback from the panelists and the audience. Students are recommended to prepare particular points they seek feedback upon. All students are expected to attend every session of the symposium.

SPLC 2023 will also be featured with one or two keynote speakers.

Submission link

Submissions should be sent using EasyChair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=splc23 (Doctoral Symposium)

Important Dates (AoE time)

  • Paper submissions: May 2, 2023 June 12, 2023 (23h59, AoE)
  • Notifications: May 30, 2023 July 2, 2023
  • Camera-ready papers: June 13, 2023 July 9, 2023
  • Doctoral Symposium: August 28/29, 2023

Chairs

Rick Rabiser
JKU Linz, Austria
Tao Yue
Simula, Norway

Contact: splc23doctoralsymposium@easychair.org

Program Commitee

  • Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory, NO
  • Mahsa Varshosaz, IT University of Copenhagen, DK
  • Oscar Diaz, University of the Basque Country, ES
  • Malte Lochau, University of Siegen, GER
  • Marianne Huchard, LIRMM, Université de Montpellier et CNRS, FR
  • Man Zhang, Kristiania University College, NO
  • Leopoldo Teixeira, Federal University of Pernambuco, BR
  • Klaus Schmid, University of Hildesheim, GER
  • Philippe Collet, Université Côte d’Azur – CNRS/I3S, FR