14th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
September 5-8, 2012 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Call for Doctoral Colloquium

The doctoral colloquium (DC) will provide a friendly, supportive, and constructive atmosphere where PhD students can present their research-in-progress for an open discussion, guided by a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners. The colloquium offers students the valuable opportunity to receive feedback and perspectives from recognize experts in the field and engage with other senior doctoral students. Often such feedback can provide valuable aid in scoping the contributions of the work and useful advice on how to evaluate effectively.

Applicants should be far enough into their PhD to have a concrete proposal and have initially outlined the salient issues and proposed research methodology. Preference will be given to applicants who have ample time before thesis submission to incorporate feedback received at the colloquium.

Format

The DC will be a seminar-style event taking place the Saturday immediately following the main UbiComp sessions. Time will be allotted to each student not only for their research presentation, but also for careful, in-depth, and constructive discussion amongst the panelists and DC participants. In order to provide such individual attention, the number of accepted DC participants will be limited to a maximum of ten.

Submission

Topic scope is the same as those listed in the Ubicomp call for papers. DC submissions should consist of the following:

  1. Research summary (4 pages, including references): 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. All research summaries should outline what work remains to be done for the dissertation and indicate the plan for completion.
  2. Student biographical sketch: including the names and affiliations of the research advisor(s), the date that the student began their PhD programme, the expected date of dissertation submission, and a single short paragraph stating what you hope to get out of participating in the Doctoral Colloquium.

The above can be e-mailed to: doctoral2012@ubicomp.org, in PDF format, on or before the submission date of Friday, June 15, 2012.

Research summaries will be reviewed by the chairs and advisory committee. If accepted, an applicant may be expected to make clarifications and improvements to their research summary before the final version is due.

The final manuscript must strictly follow the template, available from the templates page. Please note that the final version will be due by Friday, July 6, 2012.

Chairs

  • Adrian Friday, Lancaster University, UK
  • Sunny Consolvo, Google, USA

In case of any questions or concerns, please e-mail us at doctoral2012@ubicomp.org

Panelists

  • Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart, Germany
  • Jeff Hightower, Google, USA
  • Shwetak Patel, University of Washington, USA
  • Yvonne Rogers, University College London, UK

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: June 15, 2012
  • Notification of acceptance: June 29, 2012
  • Camera-ready version due: July 6, 2012
  • Doctoral Colloquium: September 8, 2012