Doctoral Consortium at ACM UMAP 2021
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ACM UMAP 2021 is the premier international conference on systems that adapt to users and user models for adaptation. It includes a Doctoral Consortium (DC) Session. The DC provides an opportunity for doctoral students to explore and develop their research interests under the guidance of distinguished researchers from the field. Doctoral students are invited to apply to present their research to experienced scholars who will provide constructive feedback and advice.
Students are expected to document in a brief submission their doctoral research (see below described submission information for further details), which will be evaluated by the consortium committee. Good quality applications will be selected for presentation at a Doctoral Consortium Session as part of the conference. Promising, but less well- developed applications will be selected for presentation at a poster session. Each student with an accepted submission will be assigned a mentor who will provide feedback on the student’s work and will discuss the doctoral research with the student and the audience at the consortium.

Important Dates
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* Paper Submission: March 9, 2021
* Notification to authors: March 31, 2021
* Camera ready submission: April 11, 2021
* ACM UMAP 2021 conference: June 21-25, 2021
* ACM UMAP 2021 DC Session: TBD, 2021

Note: The submissions times are 11:59 PM AoE time (Anywhere on Earth)


How to Submit to the Doctoral Consortium
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To apply for the ACM UMAP 2021 doctoral consortium, students should submit a paper presenting their doctoral research organized under the following headings:
* Research Problem. The problem being addressed and a motivation outlining the relevance of the problem;
* Related Work. Work already performed by other researchers related to this problem. This should situate your work, showing your knowledge of the relevant previous work and how your work will make a new contribution;
* Research Questions and Proposed Approach. The main questions the PhD project aims to answer, contributions it aims to achieve, and the thesis methodology;
* Progress to Date and Future Work. The progress made to date (including a clear description of the approach, methodology and preliminary results) as well as the plan for further research.

Topics include (but are not limited to) the ACM UMAP 2021 key areas.
Each DC submission should cover: identification of related (state of the art) work, indication of the potential innovation, application or advancement of the state-of-the-art that the work intends to achieve. In addition, as appropriate for the PhD project, each submission may cover: indication of data to be used for experimentation, indication of implementation approach, indication of evaluation criteria and experimental design.

Each DC paper submission should be accompanied by a cover page that states: the paper title, name of the PhD candidate, the name of his/her supervisor(s) and University, a paragraph describing the stage they are in the PhD programme, together with a brief description of their background. This will enable the committee to adapt its assistance to each student. The DC will be most useful to students who have completed enough of their thesis work to have a solid foundation with a clear topic and literature review but the student should be early enough in their studies to still benefit from guidance and advice.

Papers should be submitted via the EasyChair submission system https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acmumap2021 by selecting the “UMAP 2021 Doctoral Consortium” track.
Papers will be reviewed single-blind and do not need to be anonymized before submission.
Submissions should be a single pdf document consisting of 1 cover page and the paper (up to 7 pages long + references) in the new ACM single-column style.

Papers must be formatted according to the new workflow for ACM publications.
The templates and instructions are available here:
https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow.
Authors should submit their papers as single-column. The templates are available here (we strongly recommend the usage of LaTeX for the camera-ready papers to minimize the extent of reformatting):
* LaTeX (use \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} in the sample-authordraft.tex file for single-column):
https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/consolidated-tex-template/acmart-master.zip
* Overleaf (use\documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} for single-column):
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/acm-conference-proceedings-master-template/pnrfvrrdbfwt
* MS Word:
https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/taps/acm_submission_template.docx

NB: Accepted papers will require a further revision in order to meet the requirements and page limits of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of the papers will be provided after acceptance.


ACM UMAP Proceedings
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The accepted ACM UMAP 2021 Doctoral Consortium papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings, which will be published by ACM and that will be available via the ACM Digital Library. The main author (doctoral student) must register for the conference and present the paper for the paper to be included in the proceedings.

Financial Support
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ACM UMAP has a history of supporting students to attend. Authors of submissions to the DC will have higher priority for UMAP grant applications.

Doctoral Consortium Chairs
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Noemi Mauro, University of Torino, Italy
Stephan Weibelzahl, PFH Private University of Applied Sciences Göttingen, Germany
email: umap2021-dc AT um.org