The BESC 2023 Doctoral Symposium aims to provide a supportive environment that enables doctoral students to get constructive feedback on their research. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their work with experienced members in the interdisciplinary field of behavioral and social computing. Thus, the symposium offers a unique opportunity to gather valuable expert feedback and get in touch with peer students in the same field. The event is dedicated to Ph.D. students who are at least in the second year of their program, presenting their research topic and plan and possibly initial results that are not yet mature enough for a full paper. The BESC doctoral symposium covers the same research topics as the conference.

Important Dates

  • Submission of Doctor Consortium Papers: 29 July 2023
  • Second Submission: 31 August 2023
  • Acceptance Notification: 15 September 2023
  • Author Registration: 1 October 2023
  • Camera-Ready Submission: 1 October 2023

Paper Submission Details and Guidelines

To participate, students should prepare a four-page paper (excluding references) answering the following questions:

  • The research problem being addressed and its importance.
  • The research methodology and techniques being applied.
  • The solution being proposed, its novelty, and its validity.
  • The relation of the work with state of the art.

The idea of a four-page paper is to provide explicit material used as a basis for guidance and discussion. Therefore, students should think about the above points carefully and try to make their ideas as concrete and straightforward as possible. Students at relatively early stages of their research may find it challenging to address some of these points but should still attempt to do their best. It is strongly recommended that students discuss the research plan with their supervisors.

All submissions must be in English, in PDF format, and must not contain or cite proprietary or confidential material. The research plan should be submitted via the Easychair Doctoral Symposium track in the following link:
https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=besc2023.

Paper review will be single-blind. Papers will be reviewed based on the relevance, originality, and feasibility of the described research. All the accepted papers will also be shared among all DS students prior to the conference date to promote peer review and critical thinking among participants.

All accepted and presented papers expect to be included in IEEE Xplore and prepared for indexing in major service like DBLP, Scopus, Google Scholar, and EI. The student must attend BESC 2023 for the submission to be published. Students have to acknowledge their supervisory team in the Acknowledgement session.

Structure

The following structure for the four-page paper is recommended but not mandatory:

  • Title: Your name, affiliation, and email address.
  • Introduction/Motivation: Give a general introduction to the domain/area/topic and indicate its importance/impact in Behavioral and Social Computing or other domains.
  • Related literature: Describe existing work in the area, work focusing on the same/similar problems, or that might be useful to realizing your Ph.D.
  • Problem Statement and Contributions: Based on motivation and state of the art, formulate the problem you intend to solve and how you intend to contribute to Behavioral and Social Computing research. This section should include a precise formulation of one (or very few) research hypothesis (what statement you want to validate through your methodology, approach, and evaluation) and the research questions that need to be answered.
  • Research Methodology and Approach: Describe the research methodology you will apply in your research, including the different steps from the formulation of your research questions to answering them. Also, describe your approach to solving the problem identified and confirm or reject your hypothesis. Discuss how this approach is innovative and novel and how it is (might be) implemented.
  • Evaluation Plan: Describe your evaluation plan, which is how you intend to validate your hypothesis, your results, and the value of your approach. The plan might be only partially defined, and details might be omitted based on your progress in the Ph.D. work.
  • Preliminary or Intermediate Results: Being at an intermediate stage, you should report here about the results achieved to apply your approach that might not yet be sufficient for a full evaluation.
  • Conclusions and Lessons Learned: Present your intermediate conclusions and lessons learned. Describe how your results will or might impact research or the world at large. We do neither expect you to have solved all issues nor expect you to have finished your Ph.D. However, we expect you to understand these issues (although open) and have a clear plan to address them.

Please note:

  • All submissions should use IEEE two-column style. Templates are available from here.
  • All papers must be submitted electronically through the paper submission system in PDF format only. BESC 2023 accepts special session papers (6 pages).
  • The page count above excludes the references.
  • Paper review will be single-blind.
  • Papers must be clearly submitted in English.
  • (NEW) The use of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.

Contacts

For further information, please contact the Doctor Consortium Chairs:

Barbara Caci, Department of Psychology, Educational Science and Human Movement, University of Palermo, Italy.
Email: barbara.caci[at]unipa.it

Raian Ali, College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar.
Email: raali2[at]hbku.edu.qa