Call For Doctoral Consortium Submissions

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 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)