Students are invited to apply for admission to the doctoral consortium to be held at the the AI*IA 2018 conference which will take place in Trento, from the 20th November to the 23rd of November 2018.

Submission Deadline: September 3rd, 2017

The AI*IA 2018 Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for Ph.D students to explore and develop their research interests in the Artificial Intelligence field, in the broader sense, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers from both academia and industry. Attending students will have the opportunity to present their work in a dedicated workshop and to share their work with other students in a similar situation and with senior researchers during a dedicated workshop. During the entire conference every student will be paired with a senior mentor (selected from the DC program committee) who will dedicate some time for interacting with the student. AI*IA Doctoral consortium main objectives are the following:

1.      Provide a supportive setting for feedback on students’ current research and guidance on future research directions.
2.      Offer each student comments and fresh perspectives on their own work from faculty and students outside their own institution, taking advantage of mentorship opportunities.
3.      Promote the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research.
4.      Contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events.

We accept contributions from students regularly enrolled in some Ph.D. program. Exceptions might include students not yet enrolled in a Ph.D. program, but that are strongly motivated to enroll in the next future. Every contribution should be in the form of up to 5 page extended abstracts including references, in Springer LNCS format. In line with the main research track of the conference, the AI*IA 2018 Doctoral Consortium welcomes submissions on research across all areas of AI, including (but not limited to) traditional topics such as machine learning, search, planning, knowledge representation, reasoning, constraint satisfaction, natural language processing, robotics and perception, and multiagent systems.
Students with accepted extended abstracts are invited to give an oral presentation of their work during the Doctoral Consortium, and to prepare a poster to be displayed during the poster sessions of the main conference. The authors of the accepted extended abstracts are requested to attend the Doctoral Consortium and to register to the main conference. Poster should include student’s contacts in order to allow any interested person to fix an appointment with the student and discuss her/his work during the conference.

Extended abstract submission, format and publication

Prepare an up to five-page extended abstract describing your current or future research work (or on some specific issue) in the LNCS Proceedings Format. You should be the only author of the extended abstract and you should mention your advisor.

We allow two types of contributions:

1.    Overview of the Phd work, which should include: Introduction/Motivation, State of the Art, Problem Statement and Contributions, Research Methodology and Approach, Preliminary or Intermediate Results, Evaluation Plan, Conclusions (recommended for students in an early stage of the Phd)
2.    Presentation of one specific scientific achievement you have reached during the Ph.D course. The contribution could have been already published in some other venue.

In submitting a contribution, you also agree to review one abstract among those submitted by your peers to the Doctoral Consortium.
Extended abstracts are evaluated by at least 2 members of the Doctoral Consortium Committee and one Ph.D student. The main evaluation criteria include originality of the work, scientific quality, validity of claims and clarity.
The DC Committee will assign a Best Phd Paper award to the best contribution, by evaluating the subject described in the extended abstract, the quality of the presentation and poster.
Submit your extended abstract to Easychair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aiiadc2018.

Important Dates

Paper submission: September 3rd, 2018
Notification: October 15th, 2018
Camera-ready extended abstracts due: November 5th, 2018
Doctoral Consortium: TBD (between 20th-23rd November 2018)

Doctoral Consortium Co-Chairs

Marco Rospocher, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Luciano Serafini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler