We invite PhD students from the general areas of databases (DB), information retrieval (IR), and knowledge management (KM) to submit their proposals for participation in a Doctoral Consortium, which will be held on Tuesday, 20th October 2020 in the context of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2020) in Galway, Ireland.

CIKM 2020 will be a fully virtual conference, with no travel involved, and presentations will be given via pre-recorded videos, followed by synchronized online discussions during the scheduled conference period.

We welcome submissions representing a broad spectrum of research topics relevant to the CIKM community. The goal of the PhD Symposium is to provide a platform for PhD students to present and receive feedback on their ongoing research. Students at different stages of their research will have the opportunity to present their work in an online conference environment and discuss their research questions, goals, methods and results. Participants will benefit from the advice of senior researchers in the field in the form of one-to-one online discussions that will be organized.

Submission

Submission for the doctoral consortium should be made in the form of a 4-page paper including references as PDF using the ACM camera-ready templates. Submissions are not blind, but are single author papers from the doctoral candidate with clearly stating the PhD supervisors (“supervised by …”). The submitted paper should be discussed with the PhD supervisor(s) before submission. Submission should be structured according to the following key points:

Problem The research problem being addressed
State of the art The relation of the work to the state of the art in CIKM-related topics (e.g. information retrieval, databases, machine learning, knowledge engineering)
Approach The proposed approach to the problem and why it is novel
Methodology The applied methodology used and how the results are evaluated
Results The results which have been achieved so far
Conclusion and Future Work The conclusion so far and how to go on with the PhD work

In addition, please provide a one-page appendix in which is described:

  • A brief statement about the topics and questions which the PhD student wants to discuss with his mentor and peers.
  • A brief statement by the students’ advisor(s) supporting the student’s participation in the PhD Symposium, describing the current status of the research, and providing an anticipated date for thesis completion.

The submitted paper should be discussed with the students’ respective PhD supervisors before submission. Papers should be submitted through the CIKM 2020 online submission system choosing the “Doctoral Consortium” track.

Selection Process

All submissions will be reviewed by the PhD Symposium Program Committee composed of experienced researchers, who can provide feedback and suggest future research directions.

All the accepted PhD Symposium papers (excluding the appendix) will be included in the main proceedings and made available through the ACM Digital Library. If accepted, it is mandatory to present the results online at the Doctoral Consortium.

Key Dates (updated)

Submission deadline 24th July 2020
Acceptance notification 15th August 2020
Camera-ready version due 31st August 2020
Doctoral Consortium 20th October 2020

Doctoral Consortium Chairs

Daniel Hienert (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany)
Gianluca Demartini (University of Queensland, Australia)