Empirical research is the backbone of most sciences and is of growing importance in software engineering. The Empirical Software Engineering community has significantly advanced the state of the art in this area. Researchers now apply a variety of empirical techniques, but choosing the correct methods and applying them to answer interesting research questions is still an art.

The objective of the doctoral symposium is to provide early- and mid-stage PhD students with a forum to discuss their work, ask questions of senior researchers, and receive constructive feedback on their PhD topics and research plans. Accepted papers will be published in ACM Software Engineering Notes and indexed in the ACM Digital Library.

The core of the symposium are presentations by PhD students to a panel of senior faculty and research scientists, who will provide ideas, questions, and other feedback to the students. The symposium will also feature light workshop activities to help students engage the faculty advisors and a short seminar on planning and executing a PhD dissertation. Student participants will be given a poster sheet containing all of the faculty advisors’ thoughts, ideas, and suggestions.

The symposium is targeted at PhD students in the early- and mid- stages of their PhD. At a minimum, participants must have selected a PhD topic, identified a set of research questions, and have at least a preliminary research design. Students who have designed and executed experiments are welcome to submit. The symposium is not appropriate for PhD students at the end of their PhD who have completed their research activities.

Students’ PhD topics must have an empirical focus, i.e., experimentation and/or case studies are a critical part of the research plan. The PhD topic must be a software engineering topic, such as software process, requirements, design, coding practice, verification methods, software security engineering, software metrics, human factors in software development, and empirical research methods for software engineering.

Students must submit a maximum 6-page Research Proposal and letter of recommendation through EasyChair (both as a .zip-file) describing their PhD topic, research questions, research plan, and results to date, if any.

An Expert Panel will evaluate all submissions and accepted proposals will be presented at the Doctoral Symposium. Participants must attend the symposium on November 8^th and prepare a presentation on the contents of their paper. During the presentation, the faculty panel will ask the students questions and offer feedback.

Note: It is important to notice that the person that will present an accepted paper must be the doctoral student, author of the paper. Professors and colleagues are not allowed to present papers on behalf of the doctoral student.