PhD Symposium is a forum for PhD students to present ongoing research in a collaborative and friendly environment. To promote participation, two means are now available to participants:

• All accepted PhD symposium presenters will enjoy a 150 euros full conference fee. This includes coffee breaks, meals and any social activity, except the banquet
• Besides the technical feedback, students will participate in a hands-on tutorial on Design Science where their submissions will be used as a case study on the use of this research methodology

To participate, students should prepare a research plan answering the following questions:

• What is the problem you intend to investigate?
• Why is the work important?
• How are you going to do the work?
• When what has already been done and what remains to be done?

In detail, the following structure and content is strongly recommended (max 6 pages):

1. Front matter
   • Title, your name, email address, personal website, abstract
2. Introduction and Motivation
   • Introduction (area of study); description of the problem (that you tackle); what the literature says about this problem (where does existing work fail?); how you (plan to) tackle this problem; which are the requirements of a potential solution; how you (plan to) implement your solution/envisioned result; how you (plan to) validate your solution.
3. Research Issues, Objectives, and Questions (and Hypotheses)
   • The main research issues/objectives/questions/hypotheses clearly stated
4. Research Methodology and Research Design
   • The research method(s) you are using or plan to use, with appropriate references. The research design: how you concretely plan to apply the method(s), e.g., data collection and analysis, set-up for measurements/experiments, case studies, etc. How do you plan to evaluate your results? Threats to validity?
5. Preliminary key results or contributions
   • Outline/Overview of the proposed solution, results of preliminary data analysis, etc. An example to explain how the solution would work (this is very important!). What is expected to be the main result or contribution?
6. Work plan
   • Outline of the structure of your thesis. Work accomplished so far and work remaining to be done. Publication plan and other tasks planned. A detailed work plan for the next 6-12 months.
7. Key references
   • The idea of the research plan is to provide clear material to be useful 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 clear as possible. Students at relatively early stages of their research will certainly have difficulty addressing some of these, but should still attempt to do the best they can. It is strongly recommended that students discuss these points with their supervisors!

PhD Symposium papers proposals should be submitted as a single PDF file in the EasyChair system as described in the SUBMISSION INFORMATION SECTION.

• Submission deadline: March 11, 2018
• Acceptance notification: March 30, 2018
• Camera ready: April 7, 2018

All submitted papers must be formatted in accordance to the information for Springer LNCS authors at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html and submitted in PDF. Accepted contributions will be included into the ICWE 2018 Springer LNCS proceedings.

Submissions and reviewing are supported by the EasyChair system.

ICWE’18 will follow the single-blind review process. Consequently, all submissions should include the names and affiliation of all authors, and this information is made visible to the reviewers. Still, the identity of the reviewers will be kept confidential from the authors.

Papers submitted to ICWE’18 must not be under review elsewhere while under consideration for ICWE’18, nor may they have been previously published elsewhere.

Submissions that do not comply with the required submission format or that fall outside the scope of the conference will be desk rejected without reviewing.

At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference and present the work during the corresponding session.