COMPSAC 2008 DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM
(Call for papers [PDF])

IMPORTANT DATES

• April 16, 2008: Deadline for submission
• April 23, 2008: Decision notification (electronic)
• April 30, 2008: Deadline for camera-ready copy and pre-registration

OVERVIEW

The Doctoral Symposium at COMPSAC will provide an international forum for doctoral students to interact with other students and faculty mentors. Since 2006, COMPSAC has been designated as the IEEE Computer Society Signature Conference on Software Technology and Applications.

The Doctoral Symposium seeks to bring together PhD Students working in computer software and applications and related fields. Selected students will have the opportunity to present and discuss their research goals, methodology, and preliminary results within a constructive and international atmosphere.

The Symposium organizers will strive to provide useful guidance for completion of the dissertation research and motivation for a research career. The Symposium is intended for students who have already settled on a specific research proposal and have produced limited preliminary results, but have enough time remaining before their final defense to benefit from the fruitful Symposium discussions. Due to the mentoring aspect of the event, the Symposium will be open only to the students and mentors participating directly in the event.

In coordination with the technical theme of COMPSAC 2008, topics pertaining to software engineering of critical infrastructure systems such as civil, telecommunications, and medical systems will be of particular interest. Related topics include, but are not limited to, requirements analysis, co-analysis and co-design, modeling, design, development, testing, measurement, verification and validation for performance, safety, security, and dependability constraints of such systems. As effective construction of critical infrastructure systems is not limited solely to the field of computer science and engineering and is truly a multidisciplinary effort, submissions addressing multidisciplinary research topics are particularly encouraged.

All accepted papers will be published in the electronic conference proceedings by the IEEE Computer Society. .

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions will be judged on originality, overall contribution, technical merit, presentation quality and relevance to the conference topics. It is anticipated that each submission will be reviewed by at least two mentors from the program committee. Each student invited to attend will be assigned a specific mentor who will be in charge of leading the discussion after the student's presentation.
Students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium at least six months BEFORE completion of their dissertation, but after having settled on a solid dissertation topic. In the email that accompanies the abstract submission, students should identify their level of progress toward completion (i.e., briefly state the expected date of graduation).
Students desiring to participate in the Symposium must submit an extended abstract that describes their doctoral work. Each abstract submission should:

* clearly formulate the research topic
* outline the significant problems in the field and their current solutions
* present the preliminary idea, the proposed approach, and the results achieved so far
* explicitly point out the contributions of the proposed work

Detailed instructions for electronic paper submission can be found at COMPSAC2008 Doctoral Symposium Submission Site. The length of the initial submission and camera-ready versions of the abstract should be limited to 3 (IEEE Proceedings style) pages printed in 10-12point font. Please follow the IEEE Computer Society Press Proceedings Author Guidelines to prepare your papers. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to pay the student registration fee to the conference. Pending availability of funds, a limited number of travel grants may be available.

All invited participants will be asked to provide a poster describing their research, which will be displayed throughout the conference. Each accepted paper must be presented in person by the author, in a 30-minute timeslot with 20 minutes for the presentation and 10minutes for discussion and feedback.

CONTACTS

Questions should be addressed to the Doctoral Symposium Chair, Jinchun Xia, at: jxia[at]iastate.edu.