Call For Doctoral Symposium

The annual ACM/IFIP Middleware conference will include a doctoral symposium, to which all PhD students working on the topics of the Middleware conference are invited to apply. The doctoral symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 8th, prior to the main conference. 

The Middleware doctoral symposium is a welcoming and supportive environment allowing all PhD students to receive feedback, discuss their work, and prepare to get the most out of their participation in the main conference. All participating students will be offered the opportunity to engage with their peers, as well as with senior academic and industrial members of the Middleware community. This will include the feedback of panel members on the day of the symposium and individual meetings with a personal mentor during the conference. The symposium is open to PhD students at any stage of their studies. 

Applicants will be divided into two groups: 

• Planners: students at an early-stage of their thesis who are focused on crafting their research proposal and completing background research.
  
  
• Finishers: students closer to finishing their thesis or dissertation and thinking about how to present their research, its results, and its impact. 

All PhD students carrying out research on middleware topics are invited to submit a position paper to the doctoral symposium. Papers will be peer-reviewed by the symposium’s committee of selected mentors. The criteria for accepting papers includes the extent of the contribution of the work to the field, the originality of the problem, and the overall quality of the position paper. Position papers should fit within the research topics of the Middleware 2020 main conference. 

Submission Guidelines

Position papers are limited to 2 pages (for students in the planner category) or 4 pages (for students in the Finishers category). 

Submissions must use the same format as for the research papers. The suggested format is detailed on the Middleware 2020 website. Please see the submission format for the research track. 

The submissions should include an author name and associated affiliation: the only author should be the PhD student (other contributors, e.g., the PhD student’s advisor(s), can be acknowledged in a separate section at the end).

Contributions to the Middleware 2020 PhD Workshop will appear in a proceedings that supplements the main conference proceedings. 

Accepted position paper will lead to a presentation during the doctoral symposium and also  require a poster presentation during the main conference. 

Submission website

Submissions will be handled through HotCRP: http://middleware20dw.hotcrp.com/

Student Travel Grants

Doctoral students that submit their work to this symposium are strongly encouraged to apply for student travel grants to attend Middleware 2020. Students participating in the doctoral symposium will be given priority for the travel grants. Please see the conference website for more details about the student travel grant.

Doctoral Symposium Chairs

For any further questions, please contact the Middleware 2020 Doctoral Symposium chairs.

• Pramod Bhatotia (University of Edinburgh)
• Ana Lucia Varbanescu (University of Amsterdam)

middleware20dw@tudelft.nl