Doctoral SymposiumSPLASH 2020

Two Conferences, One Doctoral Symposium

This year the SPLASH Doctoral Symposium and the ECOOP Doctoral Symposium joined forces! As you can see in our Program, we have one common program, with presentations from doctoral students from both conferences. And there is a great set of invited talks, organized by our ECOOP DS Co-Chairs!

An Online Event

This year’s SPLASH and ECOOP happen online, on Clowdr. Clowdr is the “shell”, while the actual events happen within Zoom. Anyone interested to join us for the Doctoral Symposium needs to register for the SPLASH conference, and then you get access to Clowdr. There you can find a Clowdr “breakout room” named SPLASH: Doctoral Symp. with details on how to find (and join) us in Zoom at the appropriate times.

SPLASH Doctoral Symposium

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.

John Vlissides Award

This year, the John Vlissides Award will be presented to a doctoral student participating in the SPLASH Doctoral Symposium showing significant promise in applied software research.

All doctoral candidates participating in the SPLASH Doctoral Symposium are eligible. The award includes a prize of $2,000.

This award was established by SIGPLAN in 2008 in recognition of the contributions to computer science that John Vlissides made during his lifetime, thanks to generous contributions from the following companies, individuals, and organizations: IBM, Addison-Wesley, William Pugh, and SIGPLAN.

Related Student Events at SPLASH

Participants to the Doctoral Symposium are highly encouraged to submit a poster to the SPLASH Poster session, and to engage in the ACM Student Research Competition. These related events are opportunities for additional feedback and suggestions on their dissertation work, contacts for further interaction, and experience in communicating with other professionals.

Note that parallel submission of the same research description to both the Doctoral Symposium and the ACM Student Research Competition is permitted. If the proposal ends up being accepted to both events, then there will only be (at most) one publication in the ACM Digital Library; the author should pick which event it corresponds to.

More Information

For additional information, clarification, or answers to questions please contact the Doctoral Symposium co-chairs Yvonne Coady and Matthias Hauswirth.

Accepted Papers

Call for Submissions

We invite students to submit a structured proposal of their dissertation research. At the symposium, presentations will consist of the following:

• Two-minute overview stating the most critical issues of the research (the “elevator talk”) [Update: In this year’s format we will not do elevator pitches.]
• A separate (strictly-timed) presentation slot for the description of the proposer’s research. The duration of this slot should be around 30-40 minutes, with 1/3 of the time dedicated to questions from the committee and audience. The exact duration will depend on the number of accepted presentations and will be announced in due time.

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 hypotheses? 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 submit a description of your dissertation research, following the structure of research description described above, on the submission website: https://splash20ds.hotcrp.com/ by July 15, 2020, 23:59 AoE. Your advisor must also send a brief statement of your dissertation progress to date and a statement of recommendation to the Doctoral Symposium co-chairs Yvonne Coady and Matthias Hauswirth by July 15, 2020, 23:59 AoE. Please have your advisor use the following e-mail subject: [SPLASH ’20 Doctoral Symposium Recommendation for first-name last-name].

Submissions should use the ACM SIGPLAN acmart style. See http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/. Please use the provided double-column LaTeX or Word templates. Your submission should not exceed 3 pages, including references and appendices (if applicable).

Regardless of the length of your submission, your presentation should be sufficiently detailed to describe your dissertation research. The students whose proposals are selected for presentation are expected to participate in the event for the entire day.

The proceedings of the Doctoral Symposium will appear in the SPLASH Companion, published in the ACM Digital Library.

No matter whether you are a PhD student who will present, a panel member who will provide feedback, a speaker who will give an invited talk, or some other participant of SPLASH+ECOOP who just would like to watch (and maybe ask questions), here’s how to join us!

Register for SPLASH

To participate in any form in the Doctoral Symposium (DS), you need to register (and pay) for SPLASH.

Use the Program

The SPLASH+ECOOP DS is one track within SPLASH. It consists of a sequence of 5 sessions, and each session consists of one or more events (talks/presentations).

The specific information and timing is all visible in the SPLASH program.

Log into Clowdr

SPLASH+ECOOP uses Clowdr as a virtual conference platform that ties the whole live event together. To find the different virtual rooms, you have to log into your Clowdr account. You get the Clowdr account if you register for SPLASH.

On Clowdr, you find a Clowdr Breakout Room named SPLASH: Doctoral Symp. that represents our “home” during the conference. It contains a chat, where you find information (and can ask questions) already now. For example, it includes a link to the “SPLASH-VI” Zoom room in which all our sessions will take place.

Join the Zoom Room (SPLASH-VI)

The SPLASH+ECOOP conference, for its entire duration, has seven Zoom rooms open non-stop. These rooms are used for the various tracks (the main program in rooms SPLASH-I, II, and III, and the various workshops and other tracks in rooms SPLASH-IV, V, and VI) over the course of the week. We have one of those rooms, SPLASH-VI, available for us for the duration of the DS. That room will be used by other tracks before our symposium, so if you enter before we start, you will see other things going on.

During the DS, the DS co-chairs will be hosts in that Zoom room. Anyone with the Zoom link (which is not public, it’s only available in Clowdr, please don’t share it!) can join the room. So please join. If you are presenting, we will give you permissions to share your screen.

The content of our Zoom room will be streamed out to YouTube, which means that even people outside may be able to watch (but they will not be able to engage with us).

The content will not be recorded. It is only available live. So don’t miss it!