[Air-L] Call for Participation: WebSci 2014 Doctoral Consortium

[Howard Rosenbaum]

Call for Participation: WebSci 2014 Doctoral Consortium
at the
ACM Web Science 2014 Conference (WebSci 2014)
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA 
23 -26  June, 2014

http://ils.indiana.edu/faculty/hrosenba/www/web-sci-14/doc-consortium14.html

Submission deadline: 15 April 2014 

We invite doctoral students to participate in the WebSci 2014 Doctoral Consortium, which will take place as part of the ACM Web Science 2014 Conference in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. This half-day event is intended for those of you in the later stages (post-proposal) of your research on problems related to web science and information science.

Description

The goals of the Doctoral Consortium are to provide you with a supportive and critical learning opportunity to discuss your work in progress and to receive feedback and guidance from senior web and information science scholars. You will be able to explain your dissertation research and highlight theoretical and methodological problems/issues for further discussion and inquiry both with senior mentors and Consortium participants. 

The Doctoral Consortium aims to broaden the perspectives and to improve your research and communication skills. We expect you to have a specific research proposal and some preliminary results and have sufficient time prior to completing your dissertation to benefit from the consortium experience. Generally, if you are in your second or third year of PhD work, you will benefit the most from this experience. In the Consortium, you will present your proposal and receive specific feedback and advice on how to improve your research plan. The Doctoral consortium also aim to develop a supportive community within which doctoral students can begin to develop their professional networks by interacting with peers and senior scholars in web science and information science.  

All proposals submitted to the Doctoral Consortium will undergo a thorough reviewing process with a view to providing detailed and constructive feedback. The international review committee will select the best submissions for presentation at the Doctoral Consortium.

Submission information

We ask you to submit an 8 page description of your PhD research proposal electronically via the EasyChair conference submission System:

https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?key=9144634.cxJz4ovCrZ6XBK9a 

Your submission must address each of the following questions:

● Problem Statement: What is the problem that you are addressing?
● Relevance: Why the problem is important? Who will benefit if you succeed? Who should care?
● Related Work: How have others attempted to address this problem? Why is the problem difficult?
● Research Question(s): What are the research questions that you plan to address?
● Hypotheses: What hypotheses are related to your research questions (if your work has hypotheses)?
● Approach: How are you planning to address your research questions and test your hypotheses? What will you measure? What is the main idea behind your approach? The key innovation? Provide an argument, based either on common knowledge or on evidence that you have accumulated, that your approach is likely to succeed.
● Evaluation plan: How will you measure your success - faster/more accurate/less failures/etc.? 
● Preliminary results: Do you have any preliminary results that demonstrate that your approach is promising?
● Implications: What are the theoretical, methodological and practical contributions of your work?

Additional submission requirements

● All submissions must be single-author submissions. Please acknowledge your PhD advisor(s) and other contributors in the Acknowledgements section.
● Students accepted to present at the Doctoral Consortium must plan to attend the full Doctoral Consortium in order to gain as much value as possible from the experience.
● Please remember that the DC submission is not the same as a research paper.
● Submissions must be in pdf and be formatted according to the ACM Publications format.

Topics

The Consortium has the same scope of technical topics as the main WebSci conference:

● Analysis of human behavior using social media, mobile devices, and online communities
● Methodological challenges of analyzing Web-based large-scale social interaction
● Data-mining and network analysis of the Web and human communities on the Web
● Detailed studies of micro-level processes and interactions on the Web
● Collective intelligence, collaborative production, and social computing
● Theories and methods for computational social science on the Web
● Studies of public health and health-related behavior on the Web
● The architecture and philosophy of the Web
● The intersection of design and human interaction on the Web
● Economics and social innovation on the Web
● Governance, democracy, intellectual property, and the commons
● Personal data, trust, and privacy
● Web and social media research ethics
● Studies of Linked Data, the Cloud, and digital eco-systems
● Big data and the study of the Web
● Web access, literacy, and development
● Knowledge, education, and scholarship on and through the Web
● People-driven Web technologies, including crowdsourcing, open data, and new interfaces
● Digital Humanities
● Arts & culture on the Web or engaging audiences using Web resources
● Web archiving techniques and scholarly uses of Web archives
● New research questions and thought-provoking ideas 

Important Dates:

● April 15, 2014 - paper submission
● May 2, 2014 - notification
● June 23, 2014 - doctoral consortium

Doctoral Consortium Schedule:

12:00-12:30: Welcome session with light lunch

12:30-1:00: Meet mentors, group introductions and discussion of the Colloquium activities

1:00-2:30: One on one meetings where students discuss their work and receive feedback and comments from mentors

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-4:30: Students present their work to the group and receive feedback 

4:30-5:30: Group discussion about career and professional issues in a Q&A session driven by the students

From 3:00-4:30, participants will present their research briefly to familiarize each other with their dissertation project and highlight specific aspects they would like to have further discussion on. These may include specific problems that the student is seeking input on how to approach them; intriguing issues and tensions for web science and information science research generally; methodological problems that other Ph.D. students are likely to be confronting, or issues that have the potential of stimulating discussions of theoretical and methodological significance.

If you have questions about this call, please contact the co-chairs

● Howard Rosenbaum, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University
hrosenba at indiana.edu

● Pnina Fichman, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University
fichman at indiana.edu

● Lora Aroyo, Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam
lora.aroyo at vu.nl