ECOOP / Doctoral Symposium

ECOOP 2003 will provide a Doctoral Symposium. This is a forum for an invited group of doctoral students to present their work and obtain guidance from mentors as well as from other symposium participants. The mentors are senior university or industry researchers, e.g., current or former members of the ECOOP program committee. The goal of the symposium is to expose students to helpful criticism before their thesis defense, and to foster discussions related to future job perspectives. Mentors provide constructive criticism about the current status of the work, and give advice about possible future direction and focus. At a similar series of doctoral symposia held in connection with the OOPSLA conferences, some mentors have established long-term collaborations with particular symposium participants.

Symposium Organization

A group of 8 to 10 selected students present their research to each other and to a group of 4 to 5 mentors in a workshop format.

Room S1/03/104

Presentation format

A two minute overview stating the most critical issues of the research.
A twenty minute description of the research, which should be structured to address the following questions:
- What exact problem, issue, or question is this research concerned with?
- What limitations or failings of current understanding, knowledge, methods, or technologies does this research resolve?
- How significant is the problem, issue, or question?
- What new understanding, knowledge, methods, or technologies will this research generate? How does this address the purpose of the work?
- What experiments, studies, or prototypes will be produced to achieve the stated goal?
- How will achievement of the goal be demonstrated and the contribution of the work measured?
A question and answer period of approximately twenty to thirty minutes involving the student, mentors, and other participating students.

The two first phases will be strictly timed. Hence, questions and discussions should occur during the last phase only.

Each symposium participant is strongly advised to have a poster at the Poster session, which provides an opportunity for additional feedback and suggestions on the dissertation work, contacts for further interaction, and experience in communicating with other professionals. Each participant will also receive a certificate of participation. We intend to publish the two-page thesis research descriptions, but it has not yet been determined exactly how to do this.

Important Dates

Applications must be submitted	March 1, 2003
Notification of acceptance or rejection	April 1, 2003

Submissions

Doctoral students are invited to apply. Applicants should be advanced enough to have a specific research proposal and some preliminary results with enough time remaining to benefit from the symposium experience. This would typically, but not exclusively, be students who are approximately one year from thesis completion.

To apply, please submit a two-page description of your thesis research, a brief statement of how far along in your thesis work you are (how much more research and dissertation draft writing are left to do), a statement of what kind of feedback you are seeking, the names of your school and thesis advisor, and a brief letter of recommendation from your advisor. Electronic submission of applications is preferred, through the ECOOP submission system. If this is not possible for you, please contact the organizers to made other arrangements.

Submissions should be made via the ECOOP submission system, at http://cyberchair.ecoop.org/doctoralsymposium/submit/.
Applications may be modified up to the submission deadline.