The ISWC 2021 Doctoral Consortium (DC) will take place virtually as part of the 20th International Semantic Web Conference. This forum will provide PhD students an opportunity to:
- ● present and discuss their research ideas in a supportive, formative and yet critical environment;
- ● receive feedback from mentors, typically senior members of the Semantic Web research community, and peers;
- ● explore career pathways available after completing their PhD degree, and finally
- ● network and build collaborations with other members of the community.
The event is intended for students who are midway through their PhD, therefore at a stage where they have articulated a reasonably detailed research proposal, preferably supported by some preliminary results. The aim is to support the students in refining their proposal and suggest possible ways to improve their research plan and achieve results with prospective greater impact. While doctoral degrees can vary in format and conduct, we aim this Call for Papers to PhD candidates in their second, or early in their third year and who will have already partially investigated some specific problems. Students will be required to submit a paper to the doctoral consortium, structured like a research proposal. All proposals submitted to the Doctoral Consortium will undergo a rigorous review process by the International Programme Committee, who will provide detailed and constructive feedback and select those submissions to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium. If accepted, students will have to register and attend the event, which will include a range of interactive activities.
Submission Details
Students should submit an 8-page description of their PhD research proposal. All proposals have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair conference submission System.
The submission should address the following questions:
- Problem statement: what is the problem that you are trying to solve?
- Importance: Why is this problem important and for whom? Who will benefit and who should care? What is the impact of solving this problem (for the research community, or society in general).
- Related work: Has a solution to this problem been attempted before and how? If not, have research efforts tried or solved similar problems? What can you learn from these efforts? If you are addressing an existing problem, what are the limitations of current solutions? What are you adding that is novel? Why?
- Research question(s) and hypotheses: What hypotheses do you make in formulating your solution? What are the questions you need to answer in order to solve the problem? Are there boundary cases you plan to exclude or assumptions you base on?
- Preliminary results: What research methods did you follow in your proposal? Have you produced any results so far?
- Evaluation: How do you know you’ve answered your question(s)? What are the methods you apply to test your hypotheses? Have you identified criteria to measure the degree of success of your solution?
- Reflection and future work: Are there any limitations in your approach? What are your planned next steps to complete your investigation?
Please aim to answer the above questions with as much detail as possible, especially questions 2 and 4. You should provide as much detail as possible to allow a knowledgeable reviewer from the Semantic Web community, but possibly not an expert in your topic, to assess the validity of your research contribution.
All submissions should include references, which will count against the max page limit. All papers exceeding 8 pages will be desk rejected and therefore will not be reviewed.
Submissions should be authored by the student only. The supervisor(s) should be acknowledged at the end of the paper, together with a funding agency or any other party who supports or contributes to the research.
Submissions must use the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer’s Author Instructions. For HTML submission guidance, please see the HTML submission guide. They must be submitted online via EasyChair, in PDF or HTML format.
Authors of accepted papers must register and present their work at the Ph.D. Symposium. Please plan to attend the DC for the whole day in order to gain as much value as possible from the experience.
Authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis at the time of submission to the Ph.D. Symposium.
We aim to publish proceedings with CEUR-WS.org.
Topics of Interest
We are the doctoral consortium of the ISWC. As such, submissions should broadly fit the topics of interest of the ISWC research track.
Important Dates - All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (anywhere on Earth)
