Doctoral Consortium

WSDM 2018 Doctoral Consortium

The WSDM 2018 Doctoral Consortium will provide doctoral students with a unique opportunity to have substantive interaction with experienced researchers regarding their proposed dissertation research.

The objectives of the Doctoral Consortium are:

To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their research work (and their research career) with experienced researchers, likely from both academia and industry, in the area of Web Search and Data Mining who are members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee (they are also called "mentors").
To provide students with an opportunity to establish a supportive community, including other doctoral students working in related areas or at a similar stage of their dissertation research.

The Consortium will take place on Feb. 5, 2018. The format will include student presentations with plenary discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers, discussions over lunch and breaks, and panel discussions.

Candidates for the Doctoral Consortium will be selected based on the potential of their research for future impact on the field of Web Search and Data Mining and the likely benefit to the student of participating in the Consortium. Prospective attendees should have written or made significant progress toward a thesis proposal (or equivalent). We will also consider late-stage students close to completing the thesis itself, but expect less benefit to accrue to these students.

This selection will be based in part on a written submission, singly authored by the student. The submission may contain previously-published material, as well as ongoing work. Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are welcome to submit papers or posters to WSDM and associated workshops. Students accepted to the Consortium will have the option of publishing a 1-page extended abstract summarizing their research in the full conference proceedings.

Presenting students will be eligible to apply for travel support through sponsoring organizations such as ACM SIGIR. Details of how to apply will be made available to students whose proposals are accepted for presentation.

Keynote Speakers

Lada Adamic, Computational social scientist at Facebook
Xifeng Yan, Professor of Univ. of California at Santa Barbara

Mentors

Lada Adamic, Leading Computational Social Scientist at Facebook
Austin R. Benson, Assistant Professor at Cornell University
Alex Beutel, Senior Research Scientist at Google Research
James Caverlee, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University
Alistair Moffat, Professor at The University of Melbourne
Jiliang Tang, Assistant professor at Michigan State University
Xifeng Yan, Professor at Univ. of California at Santa Barbara

Detailed Program

Open events (all the WSDM 2018 attendees are encouraged to participate)

9:00-10:00am Opening and Keynotes
- 9:00-9:30am, Lada Adamic, Title: TBD
- 9:30-10:00am, Xifeng Yan, Title: TBD
10:00-10:30am PhD students presentation Part I (8 mins presentation + 2min Q&A)
- Aastha Nigam (University of Notre Dame), “Beyond Who and What: Data Driven Approaches for User Characterization”
- Jiezhong Qiu (Tsinghua University), “Engagement and Incentives in Online Community: Observational Data, Prediction Models, and Field Experiments”
- Maram Hasanain (Qatar University), “Automatic Ranking of Information Retrieval Systems”
10:30-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00-11:40am PhD students presentation Part II (8 mins presentation + 2min Q&A)
- Zijun Yao (Rutgers University), “Exploiting Human Mobility Patterns for Point-of-Interest Recommendation”
- Chen Chen (Arizona State University), “Connectivity in Complex Networks: Measures, Inference and Optimization”
- Sandeepa Kannangara (The University of New South Wales), “Mining Twitter for Fine-Grained Political Opinion Polarity Classification, Ideology Detection and Sarcasm Detection”
- John Calvo (UNSW), “Event Mining over Distributed Text Streams”

Closed-door event (open for PhD students with accepted papers and mentors)

11:45am-12:30pm 1-1 mentoring meeting
- 11:45am-12:05pm (Round 1)
- 12:10pm-12:30pm (Round 2)

Submission Guidelines

The submission has two parts. The first part, a research statement, should be no more than five (5) pages long. It will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium, and should include:

Motivation for the dissertation research and main research questions.
Background and related work (including key references).
Overview of student's research direction, which may include previously presented work as well as ongoing or proposed research.
Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate).
Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Consortium.

The second part, limited to one (1) page, describes benefits that would be obtained by attending the Consortium. It should be added as an appendix to the research statement and include:

A statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Consortium.
A brief statement (1 paragraph) by their advisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the Consortium. Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent), and when they expect the student would defend their dissertation if they progress at a typical rate.

Format Requirements

Submissions must be written in English and submitted in the ACM Conference style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style). The submission should be no more than 5 pages in length including all figures and references, but not including the one page appendix. The first page must contain the title of the submission, full author name, affiliation and contact details, an abstract of up to 250 words, ACM Computing Reviews categories, and up to 3 keywords describing the topic areas. Information about categories and keywords can be found in the ACM Web pages on the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.

Submissions

Consortium submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via the submission system.
Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee.

EasyChair submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wsdm2018dc

Key Dates

October 27, 2017 – Doctoral Consortium submissions due
December 4, 2017 – Notification of decisions
February 5, 2018 – Doctoral Consortium at WSDM 2018