Goal
The goal of the students events collocated with WICSA 2014 is to encourage students interested in software design in general and PhD students in the field of software architecture particular to actively participate and contribute to the main conjoint conferences on software architecture. The WICSA 2014 organising committee strongly encourage students to activity participate in the students events by submitting their work to the Doctoral Symposium, participating in the software design competition, and/or volunteering for helping out in the organization of the conference. The students participating in the doctoral symposium participants will be able to present their research goal, methods and preliminary research results in this domain. The Doctoral symposium aims to provide students with useful guidance and feedback for the successful completion of their dissertation from established scholars and other PhD attendees. The participants of the design competition will be able to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, creativity, and experience in designing and reasoning about the high level design of architecture for a given set of requirements. The students’ events collocated with WICSA 2014 will also help participants to establish a new research and social network of their peers in the field of software architecture. The student volunteers will be able to access to the conference events on reduced fee by helping out organize the conference.
Scope
The technical scope of the students events (i.e., the doctoral symposium and design competition) is that of WICSA2014. The list of the topics is in the WICSA2014 call for papers. The details about the software design competition will be released later on. For the doctoral symposium the students should consider participating in the Doctoral Symposium after they have settled on a dissertation topic with some initial research results. Students should be at least a year from completion of their dissertation to obtain maximum benefit from participation. We invite students at different stages to submit to the Doctoral Symposium:
- Initial stage: Students should show evidence that they are concretizing their research question and approach. These students will be involved in discussions that enable them to think critically about their ideas and proposed research approaches. The submission of this category is limited to three (3) pages;
- Mature stage: Students should have published or be about to publish research papers on concrete research question and approach. These students will be asked to present a talk about their work and get feedback to further improve it from various aspects. The submission of this category is limited to six (6) pages.
Show of interest and submissions
The students interested in participating in the software design competition should contact the doctoral symposium chair, Ali Babar ([email protected]) by January 31, 2014 for further details about the event and eligibility criteria. The students interested in volunteering for helping in organizing the conference should email to Amy Mennie ([email protected]) for registering their interests in becoming student volunteers during WICSA 2014 before January 31, 2014.
To participate at the Doctoral Symposium, students should prepare a submission package consisting of two parts, a research abstract and a letter of recommendation.
Part 1: Research Abstract. The research abstract must be in English and should cover the following aspects:
- The problem to be solved and its importance in the software architecture field;
- Previous work which has addressed similar problems explaining why they have not been previously solved;
- The proposed approach;
- The expected results;
- A plan for the evaluation of the results.
Part 2: Letter of Recommendation: The letter should include the submission number of the paper, the name of the candidate, the status of the dissertation research and an expected date for the dissertation submission.
The submissions must conform to the ACM proceedings format. Accepted papers will become part of the second volume of the WICSA 2014 proceedings to be published by ACM.
Submission System: The submissions shall be made using Easy Chair by following the link below:
Selection Process
Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee using the following criteria:
- Technical quality of the submission, e.g., clarity, precision and adequacy of the problem statement, related work, self-contained solution description, expected results and their evaluation plan.
- Overall quality, including originality of the submission, novelty of the research approach, and relevance to WICSA2014.
Important Dates
Abstract and Letter of Recommendation Submission: 13 January, 2014
Notification of decision on submission: 27 January, 2014
Camera-ready paper due: 9 February, 2014
Doctoral Symposium: 7 April, 2014
Doctoral Symposium Chair
M. Ali Babar, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Doctoral Symposium Committee
Paris Avgeriou, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Rafael Capilla, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain
Carlos Cuesta, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain
Kendra Cooper, The University of Texas at Dallas, United States
Yuanfang Cai, Drexel University, United State
Katrina Falkner, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Liliana Dobrica, University Politechnica of Bucharest, Romania
Xin Peng, Fudan University, China
Raghu Raddy, IIIT, Hyderabad, India
Bedir Tekinerdogan, Bilkent University, Turkey
Uwe Zdun, University of Vienna, Austria
Liming Zhu, National ICT, Australia