The SPLASH Doctoral Symposium provides students with useful guidance for completing their dissertation research and beginning their research careers. The Symposium will provide an interactive forum for doctoral students who have progressed far enough in their research to have a structured proposal, but will not be defending their dissertation in the next 12 months.

Sponsored By:

Accepted Papers

Call for Submissions

Symposium Logistics

At the symposium, presentations will consist of the following:

• A two-minute overview stating the most critical issues of the research (the “elevator talk”).
• A separate (strictly-timed) 40-minute description of the proposer’s research. This will be broken down into at most 25 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes of questions.
• A poster in the poster session.

Structure of Research Description

The research description in your submission and in your symposium presentation must be structured as follows:

Motivation: Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn’t obviously interesting it might be better to put motivation first, but if your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the “Problem” section first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful.

Problem: What exact problem, issue, or question does this research address? What limitations or failings of current understanding, knowledge, methods, or technologies does this research resolve? You should position your work with respect to related ideas in this section.

Approach: How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? What new understanding, knowledge, methods, or technologies will this research generate?

Evaluation Methodology: In writing the evaluation methodology section of your submission, we encourage you to emphasize two main aspects of your experiment. (1) Hypothesis: What would be the main research result? What would be the secondary research results? Phrase these as primary and secondary hypothesis. (2) Experimental Setup: How are you going to set up your experiments to test these hypothesis? What are the variables in these experiments? How do you plan to control these variables for an unbiased experimental result?

Submission Format and Process

To apply for the doctoral symposium, please send a three page (hard limit) description of your dissertation research, following the structure of research description described above, to doctoral-symposium@splashcon.org by June 13, 2014. Submissions should use the ACM SIGPLAN Proceedings Format.

Please use the following e-mail subject: [SPLASH’14 Doctoral Symposium Submission]. Your advisor must also send a brief statement of your dissertation progress to date and a statement of recommendation to doctoral-symposium@splashcon.org by June 13, 2014.

Please have your advisor use the following e-mail subject: [SPLASH’14 Doctoral Symposium Recommendation for “first-name” “last-name”]. Up to eight Proposers will be selected. Proposers are expected to participate in the workshop for the entire day.

Each symposium presenter will have a three-page short paper published in the SPLASH Companion.

Additional Requirements (new for 2014!) Proposers are required to submit a poster to the SPLASH Poster session by the doctoral symposium submission deadline (June 13 2014). Students are also highly encouraged to participate in the ACM Student Research Competition. These vehicles provide the student with an opportunity for additional feedback and suggestions on their dissertation work, contacts for further interaction, and experience in communicating with other professionals.

More Information

For additional information, clarification, or answers to questions please contact the Doctoral Symposium Chair (Lukasz Ziarek) at doctoral-symposium@splashcon.org.

Full Citation in the ACM Digital Library

Diagnosing degenerate forms in software

• Brian S. Dillon

Structured source retrieval for improving softwaresearch during program comprehension tasks

• Brian Eddy

High-performance language interoperability in multi-language runtimes

• Matthias Grimmer

HCI metacomputing: universal syntax, structured editing, and deconstructible user interfaces

• Christopher Hall

An approach to safely evolve program families in C

• Flávio Medeiros

When importless becomes meaningful

• Tomas Tauber