The ESWC 2021 Ph.D. Symposium is a forum for Ph.D. students working in all areas of Semantic Web research to present their work, meet with peers and experienced researchers, receive feedback, and learn from each other’s experiences. It aims at supporting Ph.D. students to develop the skills required to conduct and promote their research, as well as providing them with an opportunity to attend one of the most important conferences in the Semantic Web area.
Particularly, the ESWC Ph.D. Symposium will give students the opportunity to:
- Learn by constructive criticism: Established researchers and Ph.D. student advisors will provide constructive feedback to the submitted papers by means of an open and non-adversarial review process.
- Learn from a mentor: Each student will be assigned a mentor, i.e. a selected member of the programme committee. Students will interact with their mentors on both the revision of their papers and, possibly, the preparation of their presentations.
- Learn by presenting: Accepted contributions will be presented at the Ph.D. Symposium and included in the proceedings of ESWC Satellite events. Additionally, the authors of accepted contributions will have the opportunity to present their research work to an even wider audience during the ESWC poster session (choice left to the PhD student).
- Learn about research: Doing good research goes beyond writing a good paper; it includes perspectives on research as an endeavour and a career. Besides the presentations, discussions and a Ph.D. mentoring lunch will be used to exchange ideas and ask questions about all aspects of the Ph.D. and research career in general.
Submissions will be divided into two different categories depending on the advancement into the Ph.D.:
- Early Stage Ph.D.: Students who may have identified the main research problem they want to address as well as the relevant literature, and who are building their research methodology, but who might not yet have obtained significant results, or only preliminary ones.
- Middle and Late Stage Ph.D.: Students who have already defined their approach (even if incompletely) and obtained significant results (e.g., that might already have been published).
These categories do not affect the chances of being selected. They will, however, be taken into account by the reviewers in their feedback, and in the length and format of the presentation. The organisers might decide to move a submission from one category to the other, if they think it is justified.
Topics
We encourage the submission of papers covering, but not limited to, one or more of the following topics:
- Vocabularies, Schemas, Ontologies, Common Sense Knowledge
- Deductive Reasoning, Neuro-symbolic reasoning, Inductive Reasoning
- Linked Open Data and Knowledge Graphs at scale
- Social Web and Web Science
- Semantic Data Management, Big Data, Scalability
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the Semantic Web
- Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval using the Semantic Web
- Mobile Web, Sensors, and Semantic Streams
- Semantics in Services, APIs, Processes, and Cloud Computing
- Cognition and Semantic Web
- Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
- Semantic Search, Query, Integration, and Analysis
- Visualizations to support Semantic Web technologies
- Semantic Multimedia
- Semantic Web for explainable AI
- Responsible/trustworthy AI and the Semantic Web
Submission Information
Ph.D. students in all areas of Semantic Web research are invited to submit papers having 5 to 10 pages describing their Ph.D. research, in PDF or HTML format, following the LNCS template (see https://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 and https://2021.eswc-conferences.org/html-submission-guide/ for the HTML submission guide). Submissions must be uploaded to EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eswc2021phdsymposium. They will be evaluated in a closed reviewing process.
Submissions should clearly indicate the category of the submission (Early Stage Ph.D. or Middle/Late Stage Ph.D.) and should adopt the following template of sections:
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Introduction/Motivation: Give a general introduction to the domain/area/topic and indication of its importance/impact in Semantic Web research or other domains.
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State of the Art: Describe existing work in the area, work focusing on the same/similar problems or that might be useful to realising your Ph.D..
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Problem Statement and Contributions: Based on motivation and state of the art, formulate the problem you intend to solve, and how you intend to contribute to Semantic Web research. This section should include a clear formulation of one (or very few) research hypothesis (what statement you want to validate through your methodology, approach and evaluation) and the research questions that need to be answered. Middle/Late Stage Ph.D. submissions should focus on contributions to such a hypothesis.
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Research Methodology and Approach: Describe the research methodology you will apply in your research, including the different steps from the formulation of your research questions to answering them. Also describe the approach you are taking (or you intend to take for Early Stage Ph.D. submissions) to instantiate the research methodology, hence contributing to solve the problem described in Section 3 and confirm or reject your hypothesis. Discuss how this approach is innovative and novel, and how it is (might be) implemented.
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Evaluation Plan: Describe your evaluation plan, which is the way you intend to validate your hypothesis, your results, and the value of your approach. For Early Stage Ph.D. submissions, this might be only partially defined, and details might be omitted. For Late Stage Ph.D. submissions, you might have partial evaluation results.
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Preliminary or Intermediate Results: Being at an intermediate stage, you should report here about the results achieved up to now in applying your approach that might not yet be sufficient for a full evaluation.
- Conclusions and Lessons Learned: Present your intermediate conclusions and lessons learned. Describe how your results will or might impact research or the world at large. We do neither expect you to have solved all issues nor expect you to have finished your Ph.D. However, we expect you to show an understanding of these issues (although open) and to have a clear plan to address them. This symposium is the best place to discuss these issues and plans with experienced researchers and fellow students to get informed feedback!
Additional submission requirements
- All submissions must be single-author submissions. The Ph.D. advisor(s) and other contributors should be included only in the acknowledgements section.
- Authors of the accepted papers must register and present their work at the Ph.D. Symposium. Upon the authors’ choice, the option to present a poster at the regular ESWC poster session will be also given.
- Authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis at the time of submission to the Ph.D. Symposium.
- Ph.D. Symposium submissions are not regular research papers; the suggested outline should be closely followed.
- Accepted papers will be distributed to conference attendees and also appear in supplementary post-conference satellite events proceedings to be published by Springer in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
Important dates
- Submission deadline: Feb 16th, 2021
- Notification of acceptance: Mar 26th, 2021
- Revised version to mentor: Apr 9th , 2021
- Mentor’s feedback on paper: Apr 30th, 2021
- Final version: May 14th, 2021
- Draft presentation slides to mentor: May 14th , 2021
- Mentor’s feedback on presentation: May 28th, 2021
- Ph.D. Symposium: June 7, 2021
All deadlines are 23:59 anywhere on earth (UTC-12).
Ph.D. Symposium Chairs
Claudia d’Amato, Università di Bari, Italy
e-mail: claudia.damato@uniba.it
Ilaria Tiddi, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: i.tiddi@vu.nl
