Call for Papers for ACM Multimedia Doctoral Symposium

The ACM Multimedia 2009 Doctoral Symposium provides doctoral students with a unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with senior researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research.

The objectives of the Doctoral Symposium are:

• To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their proposed research with renowned and experienced researchers: the members of the Doctoral Symposium Program Committee.
• To provide students with an opportunity to establish a supportive community including other doctoral students at the same stage of their dissertation research.

The Doctoral symposium will take place during the main conference according to the following format: Each accepted PhD student get 10 minutes to present their work. Then a panel of 3 distinct professors and the audience will give constructive advice and suggestions for the remaining 20 minutes. In order to ensure the highest possible discussion quality the 3 panelists (sheppards) will interview the selected Doctoral Symposium candidates by phone before the conference, so that suggestions and advice can form in advance in addition to ad-hoc during the presentations.

Prospective student attendees should either have written, or be close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent) or have already a scientific publication. It is desirable that the student is not too close to completion, so that the event would have little or no impact on their work. Prior to submission students should discuss this criteria with their advisor/supervisor to ensure it is met.

Selection for attendance at the Doctoral Symposium will be based on a written paper, singly authored by the student wishing to attend. Abstracts of the papers will be published in the ACM Multimedia Conference Proceedings.

Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are permitted, and indeed encouraged, to submit a full ACM Multimedia full paper or short paper on their research. However, acceptance for participation in the Symposium will be based solely on the paper submitted for the Doctoral Symposium.

ACM Multimedia 2009/SIGMM may be able to provide travel grants for three students accepted to present and discuss their work at the doctoral symposium. Application details for travel grants are available on the ACM Multimedia 2009 web site.

Content Guidelines

The Symposium submission paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Symposium. To get the most out of the discussion, a paper should include:

• Motivation for the proposed research
• Background and related work (including key references)
• Description of proposed research including main research questions
• Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate)
• Particular issues highlighted for discussion.

In addition, a one page appendix to the paper (placed after the references) should include the following:

• A detailed statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Symposium.
• A statement by their advisor / supervisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the Symposium. Advisors should also state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent).

All papers will be reviewed with respect to overall quality of presentation, the potential for future impact of the research on the field of Multimedia, and the likely benefit to the student of attending the symposium. Because the abstract will be published, the abstract will be critically reviewed.

Submission Guidelines

The ACM Proceedings Format is used for Symposium papers. LaTeX and Word templates for SIGIR submissions are available from the ACM Website (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). The first page must contain the title of the paper, full author name, affiliation and contact details, and an abstract of up to 250 words, ACM Computing Reviews categories, and up to 3 keywords describing the topic areas. The paper should be no more than 6 pages in length including all figures and bibliography, but not including the one page appendix. Papers must be submitted in English. Information about categories and keywords can be found in ACM Web pages on the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.

As the format for Doctoral Symposium papers follows almost exactly that for ACM Multimedia papers, it provides useful experience in preparing papers for the conference. (Note, the accepted papers will not be published in the ACM MultiMedia 2009 Conference Proceedings; only the abstracts will be published.)

Doctoral symposium papers must be in PDF format and submitted electronically by email to Rainer Lienhart and Benoit Huet. It is the responsibility of authors to ensure that their papers use no unusual format features and are printable on a standard printer. Papers will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Symposium Program Committee. All correspondence with the author will be through email.

Important Dates