ISWC 2014 Doctoral School

The ISWC Organizing Committee is excited to announce the ISWC 2014 Doctoral School, which extends previous ISWC conferences’ successful Doctoral Colloquium event to offer a more in-depth and comprehensive experience to PhD students at different stages in their PhD research.

The Doctoral School (DS) will provide a friendly, supportive, and constructive forum in which PhD students can learn about wearable computing research and methods from internationally recognized leaders in the community and present their research-in-progress to get feedback from peers and experts in the field. The DS offers PhD students the valuable opportunity to engage in in-depth discussion on their work and gain exposure to a variety of perspectives that can help to strengthen and shape their work as they progress towards their degrees.

ISWC’s cooperation with Ubicomp extents to the DC as well. Students from the ISWC and Ubicomp DCs will do a joint "madness" session at the beginning, a joint careers panel at the end, and will be free to attend sessions from the other DC during the course of the day.

Target Participants

The Doctoral School welcomes applications from candidates who are 1-2 years away from their PhDs. However, junior PhD students are welcome to apply if they have already selected a topic they would like to pursue for their thesis work and have some initial results. Applicants should be far enough into their PhDs to have identified the salient issues and appropriate research methodology, as well as achieved some results. The research questions and proposed contributions of the dissertation research should be defined. Preference will be given to applicants who are at a stage where a substantial portion of the research has been completed but are still far enough from completion that feedback received at the DS can influence the remaining research.

Applicants accepted to the DS will be required to give a presentation on their PhD research during the DS. DS student participants will be offered free registration for UbiComp / ISWC 2014 for both the Doctoral School and the main UbiComp / ISWC 2014 conferences. DS student participants will be eligible to apply for student travel grants to attend UbiComp / ISWC 2014.

Link to student travel grant application: To appear.

DS Format

The exact format for Doctoral School will be posted soon. Please check back for more details.

Submission

Student submissions should be 3–6 pages long. Please use the ACM SIGCHI Extended Abstracts format.

Submissions (min. 3 pages, max. 6 pages) should include:

Research summary describing the work in progress, and including a ~100 word abstract. Things to consider for inclusion in the research summary are:
- the expected contribution to the field;
- the original idea or thesis statement;
- the problem domain and the specific problem addressed;
- a brief overview of related work;
- the methodological approach;
- research carried out and results so far; and
- outline of what work remains to be done for the dissertation and a plan for completion.
Objective for attending the DS. Briefly (1 paragraph) describe your objectives for attending the DS and how you think the DS will help you in your PhD.
Brief biographical sketch including the names and affiliations of the research advisor(s), the date that you began the PhD program, and the expected date of completion.

Accepted submissions will be included in the Adjunct Proceedings of ISWC 2014 and will be included in the ACM Digital Library. Furthermore, students will be invited to present a poster during the main conference.

Applications should be submitted as a PDF file to http://precisionconference.com/~iswc.

Applications will be reviewed by the Chairs and an expert committee. Interested applicants who are not sure whether to apply are encouraged to consult with the Chairs prior to applying.