[ESWC 2015] Call For PhD Symposium - DEADLINE APPROACHING !!!

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 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.
5 - Learn from a testimonial: an experienced researcher will give a
testimonial as part of the PhD Symposium, describing his/her
experience both in industry and academia. Ample time will be allocated
for a Q&A.

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. A list of topics is given
below; further topics relevant to the symposium but not included in
the list will also be considered. 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.

Topics:
Vocabularies, Schemas, Ontologies
Reasoning
Linked Open Data
Social Web and Web Science
Semantic Data Management, Big Data, Scalability
Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval using the Semantic Web
Machine Learning
Mobile Web, Sensors and Semantic Streams
Services, APIs, Processes, and Cloud Computing
Cognition and Semantic Web
Human Computation and Crowdsourcing

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 - Conclusions
Describe how your results will or might impact research or the world at large.

Important dates

Submission deadline: 12/01/2015
Notification: 09/02/2015
Revised version of submission to mentor: 26/02/2015
Final version: 13/03/2015
Draft presentation to mentor: 12/05/2015

PhD Symposium Chairs:
Claudia d’Amato (University of Bari, Italy)
Philippe Cudré-Mauroux (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Eva Blomqvist, STLab (ISTC­CNR) & Linköping University, Sweden
Olivier Curé, Université Paris­Est Marne­la­Vallée, France
Mathieu D’aquin, The Open University, UK
John Domingue, The Open University, UK
Nicola Fanizzi, University of Bari, Italy
Aldo Gangemi, Université Paris 13 & CNR­ISTC, France ­ Italy
Chiara Ghidini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Siegfried Handschuh, University of Passau, Germany
Krzysztof Janowicz, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
Freddy Lecue, IBM, Ireland
Enrico Motta, The Open University, UK
Natasha Noy, Google, USA
Bijan Parsia, University of Manchester, UK
Valentina Presutti, STLab (ISTC­CNR), Italy
Sebastian Rudolph, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Ulrike Sattler, University of Manchester, UK
Stefan Schlobach, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Luciano Serafini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Gerardo Simari, University of Oxford, UK
Elena Simperl, University of Southampton, UK
Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz­Landau, Germany
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim, Germany
Vojtech Svátek, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool, UK
Matthias Thimm, University of Koblenz­Landau, Germany
Tania Tudorache, Stanford University, USA
Juergen Umbrich, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Austria

Received on Monday, 5 January 2015 08:32:22 UTC