The ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium provides doctoral students with a unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with other researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research.
The objectives of the Doctoral Consortium are:
The Consortium will take place on the same day as the Tutorials, with the format being: student presentations with plenary discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers, and more informal discussions over lunch and dinner.
Prospective student attendees should have written, or be close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent). It is desirable that the student is not so close to completion 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 Consortium will be based on a written paper, singly authored by the student wishing to attend the Consortium. Abstracts of the papers will be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings.
Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are permitted, and indeed encouraged, to submit a full SIGIR paper or short SIGIR paper on their research. However, acceptance for participation in the Consortium will be based solely on the paper submitted for the Consortium.
SIGIR may be able to provide travel grants for students chosen to attend the Consortium. Application details for travel grants are available on the SIGIR 2008 web site.
The Consortium submission paper will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium. To get the most out of the discussion, a paper should include:
In addition, a one page appendix to the paper (placed after the references) should include the following:
All papers will be reviewed with respect to overall quality of presentation, the potential for future impact of the research on the field of Information Retrieval, and the likely benefit to the student of attending the Consortium. Because the abstract will be published, the abstract will be critically reviewed.
The ACM Proceedings Format is used for Consortium 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 5 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 Consortium papers follows almost exactly that for SIGIR papers, it provides useful experience in preparing papers for the SIGIR Conference. Note, the accepted papers will not be published in the SIGIR Conference Proceedings; only the abstracts will be published.
Consortium papers must be in PDF format and submitted electronically via the submission web page. 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 Consortium Program Committee. All correspondence with the author will be through email.
2 March 2008 - Doctoral Consortium submissions due
6 April 2008 - Notification of Acceptance
20 July 2008 - SIGIR Doctoral Consortium in Singapore
21 - 24 July 2008 - SIGIR Main Conference in Singapore