SIGIR 2012: Final Call for Doctoral Consortium Submissions

http://sigir.org/sigir2012/callfordoctoralconsortium.php

The ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium provides doctoral students with a unique
opportunity to have substantive interaction with other researchers
regarding their proposed dissertation research.

The objectives of the Doctoral Consortium are:

- To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their
research with experienced IR researchers: the members of the Doctoral
Consortium Program Committee.
- To provide students with an opportunity to establish a supportive
community, including other doctoral students at a similar stage of their
dissertation research.

The Consortium will take place during SIGIR 2012 on the same day as the
tutorials (12 August), with the format including: student presentations
with plenary discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers,
and highly interactive networking sessions over lunch and breaks with a
special emphasis on gaining insights regarding career paths after the PhD.

Prospective attendees should have written, or be close to completing, a
thesis proposal (or equivalent).  It is desirable that the student is not
so close to completion that the event would have little impact on their
work.  Before submitting, students should discuss this criterion with their
advisor or supervisor.

Over the years, the number of submissions to the Consortium has grown
steadily; as a result, the Consortium has become increasingly selective.
Candidates for the Consortium will be selected based on the potential of
their research for future impact on the field of Information Retrieval and
the likely benefit to the student of participation in the Consortium.
Priority will be given to students whose research goes beyond locally
available expertise at their home institution.

This selection will be based in part on a written paper, singly authored by
the student.  One-page extended abstracts (submitted after their selection
by students who are selected to participate in the Consortium) will be
published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings.

Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are permitted to have
previously published on their research, and are encouraged to submit papers
or posters to SIGIR and associated workshops.

SIGIR may be able to provide travel grants for students chosen to attend
the Consortium.  Application details for travel grants will be available on
the SIGIR Web site.


** Submission Guidelines **

The submitted paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the
Consortium.  To get the most out of the discussion, it should include:

- Motivation for the proposed research.
- Background and related work (including key references).
- Description of proposed research, including main research questions.
- Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate).
- Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Consortium.

In addition, a one page appendix to the paper (placed after the references)
should include the following:

- A detailed statement by the student saying why they want to attend the
Consortium.
- A statement by their advisor / supervisor saying how the student would
benefit by attending the Consortium and explaining what particular
expertise areas essential to the student are not available locally at the
student's home institution.

Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has written, or
is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent), and when they
expect the student would defend their dissertation if they progress at a
typical rate.


** Format Requirements **

- Submissions must be written in English and submitted in the ACM
Conference style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style).  The paper should
be no more than 5 pages in length including all figures and references, but
not including the one page appendix.  The first page must contain the title
of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details, an
abstract of up to 250 words, ACM Computing Reviews categories, and up to 3
keywords describing the topic areas.  Information about categories and
keywords can be found in ACM Web pages on the computing classification
system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.
- Doctoral Consortium papers will not be published in the SIGIR Conference
Proceedings; only one-page extended abstracts will be published.
- Consortium submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=sigir2012dc.  It is the
responsibility of the student to ensure that their submissions use no
unusual format features and are printable on a standard printer.
Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium
Program Committee.


** Important Dates **

26 March 2012 - Doctoral Consortium submissions due
30 April 2012 - Notification of decisions
12 August 2012 - Doctoral Consortium in Portland


** Co-Chairs **

Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo! Research (Spain); Maarten de Rijke, University of
Amsterdam (the Netherlands)