Call for PhD Symposium

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• Submission deadline: December 10, 2024 
• Notification of acceptance: January 20, 2025 
• Camera-ready version: February 7, 2025 
• PhD Symposium: TBA

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

• TBA

The PhD Symposium is open to all PhD students. PhD students at the beginning stages of their doctoral work are particularly welcome when they have a well-defined problem statement and ideas about the solutions they would like to discuss. PhD students in a more advanced stage of their work are also welcome to share and discuss their research results and experiences, and practice job talks. 

Formatting Requirements.  Submissions must be written in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf). Word users may use the Word Interim Template. The recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass[sigconf, review]{acmart}.

Submission must be as a single PDF file: 4 (four) pages in length, including references.

Submission Site. Submissions must be made through the EasyChair system at: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=www25companion (select the WWW25 - PhD Symposium track).

Authorship. Submissions must be single-author, non-anonymous and be on the topic of the doctoral work. The supervisor’s name must be clearly marked (« supervised by … ») on the paper, under the author‘s name.

Structure. Submissions should be written based on the following structure, which focuses on the key methodological components required for a sound research synthesis:

• Abstract: A self-sustained short description of the paper.
• Introduction/Motivation: Provide a general introduction to the topic and indicate its importance/impact on Web research and real-world applications.
• Problem: Describe the core problem of the PhD thesis.
• State of the art: Briefly describe the most relevant related work.
• Proposed approach: Briefly present the approach taken and motivate how this is novel regarding existing works.
• Methodology: Sketch the methodology that is (or will be) adopted and, in particular, the approach to be taken for evaluating the results of the work. Especially in problems with no established benchmarks, we would like to emphasize the importance of a thorough evaluation plan as part of the submission.
• Results: Describe the current status of the work and the most significant results that have been reached so far
• Conclusions and future work: Conclude and specify the major items of future work.

All submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Program Committee of the PhD Symposium, who are experienced researchers in the relevant areas. Students of accepted submissions will have the opportunity to discuss their submissions in more detail and receive additional feedback from mentors.

Publication. Each accepted paper will be included in the Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2025. In addition, each paper is required to submit a brief pre-recorded video, which will appear on ACM Digital Library, along with the PDF.

They are considered non-archival for publication purposes, which means that the research presented at the symposium can be published somewhere else.

Registration. To be included in the proceedings, every accepted paper must be covered by a distinct conference registration. This registration must be Full Conference (5-day) or Workshops/Tutorials (2-day) registration, payment of which must be completed by the camera-ready deadline. 

Presentation. Due to the mentoring component, PhD symposium presenters are expected to register for the conference and be physically present. Each participant will have a slot for presenting their research, followed by a Q&A session as well as a discussion with the mentors from the panel. 

• Prof. Gabriella Pasi (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)
• Dr. Ruihong Qiu (The University of Queensland, Australia)
• Prof. Mark Sanderson (RMIT University, Australia)