PhD Retreat on Alps – Call for Submissions
The ICSOB 2022 PhD Retreat is an exciting one-day event that will happen on the beautiful Italian Alps. The retreat is designed to bring together PhD students who work on research related to software-intensive business. Additional details on the conference and our research topics are available here. The PhD Retreat provides a friendly and developmental environment for PhD students to present their research proposal as well as intermediate results, and to discuss them with experts and peers of PhD students in the same field.
The main goals of the PhD Retreat are to provide an opportunity for PhD students to:
- Interact and exchange ideas with researchers and practitioners in the software-business research community.
- Interact with other PhD students and exchange ideas and suggestions.
- Receive constructive feedback on their current and future research.
- Develop a critical discussion about their work with experienced researchers.
- Present their work as a poster at the ICSOB 2022 poster session.
- Build your research network and have fun!
The PhD Retreat will take place at a beautiful location on the Italian Alps - Renon mountain, which is at the very heart of South Tyrol, above the region’s capital city Bolzano. The retreat will be hosted by “Haus der Familie”, a retreat center that is built for hosting courses and community events. It is right on the path of the famous “Freud Promenade”, the forest trail named after the famous psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud, who spent his holidays in summer 1911 in a nearby hotel. Therefore, in addition to the technical sessions, the PhD retreat participants will have the opportunity to explore the beautiful mountains, walk on the Freud Promenade, and explore the tranquility they have to offer.
Targeted participants
PhD students should consider participating in this PhD Retreat if they have already identified a topic to focus their PhD thesis on and have a proposed methodological plan (early-stage PhD students). It also targets PhD students who are in the mid-stage progress of their thesis (mid-stage PhD students). However, the PhD Retreat is NOT suitable for PhD students at the end of their PhD who have completed all of their research activities.
Submission Categories
We welcome two categories of submission:
- Early-stage PhD submission. This category is for PhD students who have an initial idea about their thesis topic and research design, and are looking for early feedback on how to proceed with their PhD thesis.
- Mid-stage PhD submission. This category is for PhD students who already started the implementation of their thesis with some preliminary results, and are looking for feedback before completing their PhD thesis.
Important dates
- Deadline for submissions extended:
5 September 202211 September 2022 - Notification of acceptance extended:
15 September 202216 September 2022 - Camera-ready submission: 30 November 2022
Submissions
The PhD Retreat submission must consist of two elements:
- A letter from the PhD student’s supervisor. The letter should include the current state of the PhD student’s research as well as the expected date to complete the PhD thesis. The letter should be submitted via email, directed to the PhD Retreat chairs (aaaldaeej@iau.edu.sa and lzaina@ufscar.br).
- A short paper that describes the PhD student’s thesis. The short paper should not be anonymous and should meet the following requirements:
- Be authored only by the student and his/her supervisors.
- Clearly state the problem to be addressed in the student’s thesis, and why this problem is important to be tackled.
- Explain the expected contributions of the thesis.
- Discuss related work, and the knowledge gap in the literature that has been addressing in the thesis.
- Describe the research methodology and the evaluation plan of the results.
- It should present the planned timeline for thesis completion
- Present the results achieved so far (requested for the mid-stage submission only)
To address the items above, we suggest the following structure: Problem, Knowledge Gap, Methodology, Timeline, Preliminary results (if any), and Expected contributions.
Students interested in participating in the PhD retreat must submit a short paper (5-9 pages) using the CEUR-ART one column template which is available here: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip (LaTeX) or http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEUR-Template-1col.docx (Word). We are aiming to submit the ICSOB 2022 Companion Proceedings, including the PhD retreat papers to CEUR-WS.org for online publication. Please note, there may be some restrictions regarding the volume of papers published via CEUR-WS.org which may prevent the online publication of PhD retreat papers.
All submissions must be written in English.
EasyChair Submission
We invite you to submit your proposal to PhD Retreat track via the EasyChair submission system.
Review process
All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee. The main evaluation criteria are relevance, originality, soundness, accuracy, and clarity.Presentation
Accepted submissions will have the opportunity to present their work in the PhD Retreat, and to have camera-ready of their papers published in the post-conference proceedings. The camera-ready will be sent after the conference (deadline Nov 30, 2022), so that participants have the chance to polish their paper based on the feedback they got from the conference.Participants (of the accepted submissions) will present their research in the conference. Each participant has a max of 10 minutes to present, and 5 min for answering questions. There will be networking breaks after blocks of presentations, where participants can get feedback and comments about their research in a more relaxed QA session.
After completing all the presentations, there will be a thesis-design workshop session held by experts who will be acting as mentors for the participants during the session.
In addition, participants will be invited to present at the poster session of the main conference to get more feedback from the conference attendees. This poster session will be an additional (optional) choice for the PhD retreat participants, without the need to submit their research to the poster track. For those participants who are interested to present at the poster track, you can see the poster submission here for more details about the poster formatting, in case you decide to participate. This information can help for preparing their physical posters to be consistent with the poster track formatting.