Doctoral Symposium

The Doctoral Symposium on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms (SLS-DS) is part of the Workshop on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms, which this year will take place in Brussels, Belgium on September 3-5 2009. The main goal of the Doctoral Symposium is to serve as a forum in which researchers working towards a doctoral degree can:

1. present their research and obtain constructive feedback from both senior and junior researchers
2. review the work of peers in the same or similar field of their expertise
3. expand their professional contact network by meeting active researchers in the field
4. discuss carreer options with senior researchers
5. experience an international research event

The number of participants to the doctoral symposium will be limited. The organizers' decision on the acceptance of a submitted work for presentation at the symposium will be based on an extended abstract describing the author's research. All submissions will be reviewed for relevance, quality and clarity of presentation.

Presentation Format

Submissions to the doctoral symposium will be presented in a poster session at the SLS Workshop. That session will be preceded by poster spotlights, in which participants present their work in a short single-slide presentation.

Proceedings

Accepted extended abstracts will appear in the doctoral symposium's proceedings which will be distributed to all participants of SLS-DS. The proceedings will be made available to the community at large by publishing them as an IRIDIA Technical Report online (ISSN 1781-3794).

Submission

Submissions of 5-page extended abstracts are invited from doctoral students conducting research on all aspects of engineering stochastic local search algorithms. See the main workshop call for papers for the relevant research areas.

Submitted abstracts must be written in English, typeset in LaTeX2e, and formatted in the Doctoral Symposium formatting style. Please download the formatting style package for LaTeX2e. Authors are expected to use the default font and font size of the formatting style and submit their abstract in PDF format. Contributions that do not respect these guidelines will be rejected.

Submissions should be sent by email to Frank Hutter and Marco A. Montes de Oca

By submitting an extended abstract, the author(s) agree that, if their abstract is accepted, they will:

1. Submit a final, revised, camera-ready version by the deadline for camera-ready extended abstracts,
2. Register at least one author for the Doctoral Symposium or SLS Workshop
3. Attend the Doctoral Symposium (at least one author) to present their accepted abstract as a single slide oral presentation and as a poster.

Review Process

Since one of the goals of the doctoral symposium is to give feedback to the doctoral students that submit their work, each submission will receive at least two reviews that will be done by

• a member of the program committee,
• an author of an accepted paper to the main workshop, or
• a fellow student who also submitted a work to the symposium.

By involving authors of submitted works to the SLS workshop and/or the SLS doctoral symposium, we hope to give doctoral students feedback from active researchers in the field.

Important Dates

June 26, 2009	Submission deadline for extended abstract
July 10, 2009	Extended submission deadline for extended abstract
August 7, 2009	Author notification
August 14, 2009	Camera-ready submission deadline

Program Chairs

1. Frank Hutter, CS Department, University of British Columbia, Canada
2. Marco A. Montes de Oca, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Program Committee

1. Alejandro Arbelaez, Microsoft Research/INRIA Joint center, Orsay, France
2. Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
3. Tom Carchrae, Actenum, Vancouver, Canada
4. Matteo Gagliolo, IDSIA, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland
5. Holger H. Hoos, CS Department, University of British Columbia, Canada
6. Arnaud Liefooghe, Université Lille 1, France
7. Manuel López-Ibáñez, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
8. Horst Samulowitz, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
9. Thomas Stützle, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Additional Reviewers

1. Alastair Andrew, University of Strathclyde, UK
2. Marenglen Biba, Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
3. Saifullah Bin Hussin, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
4. Matteo Borrotti, Università di Bologna, Italy
5. Stefan Eppe, CoDE-SMG, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
6. Chris Fawcett, University of British Columbia, Canada
7. Alvaro Fialho, Microsoft Research/INRIA Joint center, Orsay, France
8. Doug Hains, Colorado State University, USA
9. Sabine Helwig, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
10. Christian Horoba, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany
11. Franco Mascia, Università degli Studi di Trento, Italy
12. Jesica Rivero, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
13. Francesco Sambo, Università di Padova, Italy
14. Andrew Sutton, Colorado State University, USA
15. Cristina Teixeira, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
16. Pieter Vansteenwegen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
17. Nadarajen Veerapen, Université de Nantes, France
18. Zhi Yuan, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium