Doctoral Consortium

Doctoral consortium

PhD students working in the area of Process Mining are invited to submit their proposals for participation in a Doctoral Consortium, which will be held on Friday, October 27, 2023, in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2023) in Rome, Italy.

The Doctoral Consortium has the following objectives:

to provide valuable feedback on students’ research topics, directions, methods and plans;
to help students pitch their research ideas to peers in the research community;
to promote the development of a community of scholars that will help students in their future careers;
to introduce new scholars to the process mining research community and provide opportunities to meet and interact with experienced researchers.

The PhD candidates of the accepted proposals are expected to present their PhD project at the Doctoral Consortium. During the event, there will be interactive sessions to discuss diverse aspects of the presented project with experts in the field.

We welcome submissions representing a broad spectrum of research topics related to Process Mining. Participants will benefit from the advice of senior researchers in the field and from interaction with peers at a similar stage of their careers. Also, they will receive valuable feedback on how to shape their thesis from experts in the area, which could be useful to participate in the Best Process Mining Dissertation Award at ICPM at the end of their Ph.D. program.

Submission

PhD students interested in engaging in detailed discussions on their research at the Doctoral Consortium are invited to submit an extended abstract, which describes their thesis work and elaborates on the following discussion points in particular:

The main research question guiding the envisaged research;
The motivation of the research questions (what is new about the research question and why is this important to be investigated?);
The initial ideas on the solution being proposed and its validity;
The planned research methodology and possible techniques being applied, with specific attention on how the results are going to be validated;
The relation of the work to the state of the art, especially (but not only) in process mining research.

The points above will be considered by the jury to evaluate the contribution (see “Review process” below for further details).

The extended abstract should be discussed with the respective PhD supervisor before submission. The manuscript must be written in English and prepared using the latest IEEE Computational Intelligence Society conference proceedings guidelines (8.5″ × 11″ two-column format). Templates are available for Latex and Word. The manuscript should not exceed 2 pages.

The manuscript should be submitted as a single PDF file by midnight (Anywhere on Earth, AoE) by August 16, 2023, via the ICPM 2023 submission website on EasyChair by selecting the “Doctoral Consortium” track. Proceedings shall be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication.

Review process

Submitted proposals will be reviewed by the Doctoral Consortium Committee. The review of the reported research work in each proposal will consider its originality, its potential for advancing the process mining field, and whether the work is at a stage where the PhD candidate can benefit from participating in the consortium. Also, the presence, clarity and depth of the aforementioned discussion points will determine the judgment of the reviewers.

Experimental results for the proposed research are not required. However, a concrete plan for the PhD project is a must. Rejected submissions will receive written feedback. Confidentiality of submissions will be maintained throughout the review process.

Notification

Authors will be notified of the result of their submission by September 6, 2023. Accepted doctoral candidates will receive instructions on how to submit a camera-ready copy of their proposal and will receive information on the preparation of the presentation (see “At the conference” next).

Candidates whose proposal is accepted to the Doctoral Consortium are expected to fully commit themselves to the success of the consortium by being open to new ideas and suggestions as well as to provide ideas and suggestions to other participants. All accepted contributions will be circulated among the participants about one week before the consortium.

At the conference

The format of the Doctoral Consortium is highly interactive, to the extent that presentations may be subject to changes on the day of the event: students will receive advice on how to shape their work better and, consequently, on how to position their research. Students will give a short pitch of their topic to the group. Jana Rehse will give a keynote on research methods in process mining. After lunch, there will be three roundtables, where the participants will discuss and deepen their topics guided by several senior researchers in the field.

The venue is open to all participants, including PhD students other than the ones that present their work and their supervisors. The students who present their work are expected to attend every session of the consortium. Attendance is free of charge, and the Doctoral Consortium papers do not come with a publication fee.