Doctoral consortium

WSDM 2013 Doctoral Consortium will provide 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:

• To provide a forum where doctoral students can present and discuss their research with experienced Web, Search and Data Mining researchers who are members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee.
• To provide students with an opportunity to establish and contribute to a supportive community, including other doctoral students at a similar stage of their dissertation research.
• The Consortium will take place on Tuesday, February 5, and will be a full day reserved to the event. The format will include student presentations with plenary discussions, individual meetings with experienced researchers, and discussions over lunch and breaks.

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.

This selection will be based in part on a written paper, singly authored by the student. For students who are selected to participate in the Consortium, a two-page extended abstract will be published in the WSDM Conference Proceedings.

Doctoral students who submit to the Consortium are permitted to have previously published on their research, and are encouraged to submit papers or posters to WSDM and associated workshops.

Submission Guidelines

The submitted paper (up to five pages) will be the basis for detailed discussions at the Consortium. It should include:

• Motivation for the proposed research.
• Background and related work (including key references).
• Description of proposed research, including main research questions.
• Research methodology and proposed experiments (where appropriate).
• Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Consortium.

In addition, a one-page appendix to the paper describing benefits that would be obtained by attending the Consortium. It should include:

• A statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Consortium.
• A statement 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 paper 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 paper, 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 ACM Web pages on the computing classification system and in the LaTeX and Word templates.

Updated versions of the accepted submissions (five-page limit) will be published the WSDM conference proceedings.

Consortium submissions must be in PDF format and submitted via email to the Doctoral Consortium Chairs: Ricardo Baeza-Yates ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ), Fabrizio Silvestri ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )

Submissions will be reviewed by the members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee.

Questions can be addressed via email to the Doctoral Consortium Chairs.