Doctoral Symposium  on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
                                 
                             SLS-DS 2009
                                   

                3-5 September, 2009. Brussels, Belgium

              More details and up-to-date information at
                       iridia.ulb.ac.be/sls2009

                                   

                                   
The Symposium
======================

The Doctoral Symposium on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms
(SLS-DS) is part of the Workshop on Engineering Stochastic Local Search 
Algorithms, which this year will take place in Brussels, Belgium on
September 3-5 2009. The main goal of the Doctoral Symposium is to serve
as a forum in which researchers working towards a doctoral degree can:

   -- present their research and obtain constructive feedback from both
senior and junior researchers
   -- review the work of peers in the same or similar field of their
expertise
   -- expand their professional contact network by meeting active
researchers in the field
   -- discuss carreer options with senior researchers
   -- experience an international research event

The number of participants to the doctoral symposium will be limited.
The organizers' decision on the acceptance of a submitted work for
presentation at the symposium will be based on an extended abstract
describing the author's research. All submissions will be reviewed for
relevance, quality and clarity of presentation. 


Relevant Research Areas
========================

  All areas relevant to the main workshop. Typical, but not
  exclusive, topics of interest are:

    + Methodological developments for the implementation of SLS
      algorithms (engineering procedures, integration of tools in the
      SLS engineering process, ...)

    + In-depth experimental studies of SLS algorithms (behavior of SLS
      algorithms, comparison of SLS algorithms, ...), problem
      characteristics (search space analysis, ...) and their
      impact on algorithm performance.

    + Tools for the assistance in the development process of SLS
      algorithms (software libraries, automatic and semi-automatic
      tuning procedures, learning techniques, ...).

    + Case studies in the principled development of well designed 
      SLS algorithms for practically relevant problems.

    + Aspects that become relevant when moving from "classical"
      NP-hard problems to those including multiple objectives,
      stochastic information or dynamically changing data.

    + New algorithmic developments (usage of AI/OR techniques, large
      scale neighbourhood searches, new SLS methods, data structures,
      distributed algorithms, ...)

    + Theoretical analysis of  SLS behaviour and their impact
      on algorithm design (analysis of operators, dynamic behaviour 
      of SLS algorithms, ...) 

Presentation Format
====================

Submissions to the doctoral symposium will be presented in a poster 
session at the SLS Workshop. That session will be preceded by poster 
spotlights, in which participants present their work in a short
single-slide presentation.

Proceedings
====================

Accepted extended abstracts will appear in the doctoral symposium's 
proceedings which will be distributed to all participants of SLS 2009. 
The proceedings will be made available to the community at large by 
publishing them as an IRIDIA Technical Report online (ISSN 1781-3794).

Submission
====================

Submissions of 5-page extended abstracts are invited from doctoral
students conducting research on all aspects of engineering stochastic
local search algorithms. See the main workshop call for papers for the
relevant research areas.

Submitted abstracts must be written in English, typeset in LaTeX2e, and 
formatted in the Doctoral Symposium formatting style. Please download
the formatting style package for LaTeX2e. Authors are expected to use
the default font and font size of the formatting style and submit their
abstract in PDF format. Contributions that do not respect these
guidelines will be rejected.

By submitting an extended abstract, the author(s) agree that, if their
abstract is accepted, they will:

   1. Submit a final, revised, camera-ready version by the deadline for
camera-ready extended abstracts,

   2. Register at least one author for the Doctoral Symposium or SLS
Workshop

   3. Attend the Doctoral Symposium (at least one author) to present
their accepted abstract as a single slide oral presentation and as a
poster.

Review Process
====================

Since one of the goals of the doctoral symposium is to give feedback to
the doctoral students that submit their work, each submission will
receive at least two reviews that will be done by

    * a member of the program committee,
    * an author of an accepted paper to the main workshop, or
    * a fellow student who also submitted a work to the symposium.

By involving authors of submitted works to the SLS workshop and/or the
SLS doctoral symposium, we hope to give doctoral students feedback from
active researchers in the field.

Important Dates
====================
July 10, 2009   Extended submission deadline for extended abstract

August 7, 2009  Author notification
August 14, 2009 Camera-ready submission deadline


Program Chairs
====================

Frank Hutter, CS Department, University of British Columbia, Canada
Marco A. Montes de Oca, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium 


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