Call for Doctoral Symposium Contributions

The Doctoral Symposium provides PhD students a forum to present research results, and to receive constructive feedback and mentoring. Students at different stages will be able to present and discuss their problem statement, goals, methods, and results. The forum aims to provide students with useful guidance on various aspects of their research from established researchers and other PhD students working in research areas related to distributed event-based systems. Additionally, the forum aims to enable PhD students to interact with the other participants to stimulate an exchange of ideas and experiences.

The Symposium welcomes submissions by PhD candidates working in distributed and event-based computing and data analysis. We are interested in all the topics of DEBS 2026, including, but not limited to:

• Models, architectures, and paradigms
• Systems and software
• Applications and use cases

Accepted submissions will need to be presented during the Doctoral Symposium. Additionally, the students will be provided an opportunity to present a poster at the main conference. Accepted submissions will be posted on the website of the DEBS conference, but they will not be part of the proceedings published in the ACM Digital Library. Hence, a DS submission does not affect future publication of the work in conferences/journals.

Submissions must be no longer than 4 pages (total, including all appendices and references) and must adhere to the two-column "sigconf" ACM conference proceeding style. Templates and examples in LaTeX and various versions of Microsoft Word are available for download from the ACM Master Article Template web pages at www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Submissions must be in PDF (Adobe’s Portable Document Format) format.

Submissions must be single-author, on the topic of the doctoral work. The PhD supervisor's name must be clearly marked ("supervised by ...") on the paper, under the author's name.

Further details regarding the submission process will be provided soon.

Submission Structure

Submissions should be written based on the following structure, which focuses on the key methodological components required for a sound research synthesis:

• Problem Statement: What is the core problem your PhD investigates? Why is it relevant? How valuable are the results to the problem (external validity)?
• Research approach/Methodology: What methodology (Data Science, Macro-Meso-Micro Research Question, Action Research, etc.) are you following? How suitable is the method (internal validity)?
• Research setting: What are your research questions? Which hypotheses are you going to investigate? (Note that hypotheses must be falsifiable!) What are the assumptions?
• State of the art / Related work: Who has worked on your problem (or a similar one)? What are the main differences between existing research and yours? How and why is your research novel with respect to the state of the art? Authors can include a state of the art section before the approach or a related work section after their approach.
• Research approach: What is the proposed solution to the problem statement? How does it answer the research questions?
• Evaluation plan: How are you going to evaluate your research? Which datasets will you use? Are you using any established benchmarks? Have you reached any result so far?
• Conclusions and reflections: What is the current status of your research? What are the main challenges you are facing? Why do you think your research will be successful?

The forum is open to all PhD students. PhD students at the beginning of their research journey are particularly welcome when they have a well-defined problem statement and some ideas about the solution that they want to discuss. PhD students at a more advanced stage of their research should still have sufficient time remaining before completing their dissertation to be able to benefit from feedback provided from participation in the DEBS Doctoral Symposium.

Important Dates

Deadlines expire at 11:59pm AoE.

Diversity & Inclusion Resources

We encourage all participants to contribute to a respectful, inclusive, and professional environment. Please take a moment to consult the following important resources:

• Inclusion, Equity and Diversity in Writing
• Tips for Creating Inclusive Talks and Videos
• DB DEI Code of Ethics
• ACM Policy Against Harassment (Code of Conduct)