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

Two-minute overview stating the most critical issues of the research (the “elevator talk”).
A separate (strictly-timed) slot for the description of the proposer’s research.
This will be broken down into at most 25 minutes of presentation followed by 15 minutes
of questions from the committee and audience.

Note that the duration of the separate slots may slightly vary depending on the number of received

contributions, but it is our specific goal to plan enough room for questions.

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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?

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Submission Process

Submissions should follow the structure of research description described above, and use the
and use the ACM SIGPLAN acmart style. See http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/.

Your submission should not exceed 3 pages, including references and appendices (if applicable).
You are not required to use up all 3 pages, but we leave it as an option for students who want to use
the Doctoral Symposium paper to publicly document the current progress and contributions of their research.
We expect the majority of submissions to be in 2-3 pages. Regardless of the length of your submission,
your presentation should be sufficiently detailed to describe your dissertation research.

For the submission, please use the submission system at: https://splashdoctoralsymposium17.hotcrp.com/
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 July 7, 2017. Please have your advisor use
the following e-mail subject: [SPLASH’17 Doctoral Symposium Recommendation for first-name last-name].

The students whose proposals are selected for presentation are expected to participate in the event for
the entire day. Each symposium presenter will have a short paper published in the SPLASH Companion.

Proposers are highly encouraged to submit a poster to the SPLASH Poster session, and 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.


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Important Dates

Paper submission: July 7, 2017
Author notification: August 14, 2017
Camera ready submission: August 28, 2017

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Contact Information

For further inquires, do not hesitate to contact the Doctoral Symposium chair via
doctoral-symposium@splashcon.org.