The RuleML+RR Doctoral Consortium is an initiative of the RuleML and RR communities to attract and promote student research in rules and reasoning. It offers students a close contact with leading experts on the field, as well as the opportunity to present and discuss their ideas in a dynamic and friendly setting.

We invite PhD students at an early or intermediate stage of their PhD studies as well as exceptional Master’s students who are interested in pursuing a PhD to submit papers describing their research on any of the topics of interest of RuleML+RR 2017, available at the conference website: http://2017.ruleml-rr.org/

The submissions should cover the following aspects:

* A clear formulation of the research question and the motivation.
* An identification of the significant problems in the field of research.
* An outline of the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions.
* A presentation of any preliminary ideas, the proposed approach and the results achieved so far.
* A sketch of the applied research methodology and its positioning in the field.
* A description of the student project's contribution to the problem solution.
* A discussion of how the suggested solution is different, new, or better as compared to existing approaches to the problem.
* A research plan and the potential achievements.

The accepted DC papers will be presented to an interested audience and will be discussed with a panel of senior researchers from academia and the industry. Students will present their work through brief oral presentations during a dedicated session of the RuleML+RR main track, but also in the form of posters.

Proceedings
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Accepted papers will be published online as part of CEUR-WS Proceedings, which are broadly indexed, e.g., by SCOPUS and listed in standard bibliographic databases such as DBLP.

This year, a selection of the best Doctoral Consortium papers will also be included as short papers in the main track Springer LNCS proceedings.

Important Dates
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* Paper submission: 13 March 2017
* Author notification: 10 April 2017
* Camera-ready submission: 24 April 2017

Submission guidelines
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DC papers are limited to 8 pages written in English following the LNCS (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) format and submitted electronically in PDF format jointly with a maximum 2 page CV.

Please submit your paper and CV to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rulemlrr2017dc
If you do not have an EasyChair account, please sign up at: http://www.easychair.org

Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the PC. The names of the PC members are available on the DC web site:
http://2017.ruleml-rr.org/doctoral-consortium/

Mentoring
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Each student with an accepted DC paper will be assigned a mentor with similar research interests from the RuleML+RR community, with whom they will discuss the student’s research during a mentoring session of the conference. The following researchers have tentatively accepted our invitation for the list of mentors (keep an eye on the DC site, as the list is expected to grow):

* Harold Boley
* Diego Calvanese
* Simona Colucci
* Stefania Costantini
* Giovanni De Gaspaeris
* Enrico Franconi
* Guido Governatori
* Roman Kontchakov
* Domenico Lembo
* Rafael Penaloza
* Francesco Ricca
* Dumitru Roman
* Omair Shafiq
* Giorgos Stamou
* Kia Teymourian


Registration & Student Travel Support
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Registration information will soon become available at the main conference web site (http://2017.ruleml-rr.org/). Reduced registration fees will be offered to all student participants of the conference.

Financial support is available to enable student authors to travel to the Symposium. These are awarded on a case-by-case basis. Proof of studentship will be required at time of registration.


Other collocated events
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Students participating in the Doctoral Consortium will also have access to all the sessions of the main RuleML+RR track as well as to its collocated events:

* The 11th International Rule Challenge
* The RuleML+RR 2017 Industry Track
* Decision Camp 2017

More information about the conference and the collocated events is available at: http://2017.ruleml-rr.org/

We would also like to invite students to the collocated 13th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2017), which will take place at the same venue prior to RuleML+RR 2017: 7-11 July, 2017 (http://2017.ruleml-rr.org/13th-reasoning-web-summer-school-rw-2017/). Students registered for the Doctoral Consortium will be offered a discount for the registration to RW 2017, and vice versa.

With kind regards,

RuleML+RR 2017 Doctoral Consortium Chairs
Antonis Bikakis, University College London, UK
Theodore Patkos, Institute of Computer Science, FO.R.T.H., Greece