Doctoral SymposiumACSOS 2026

Call for Papers

The Doctoral Symposium provides an opportunity for PhD students to present their research and ideas, and network with the ACSOS community, consisting of a diverse audience of both leading experts and early career researchers in the field. The Doctoral Symposium not only offers early career researchers a chance to gain experience in presenting to an international audience but also to receive invaluable feedback about their work from members of the ACSOS community. PhD students are invited to submit a two-page abstract, with another page for references, using the format in the submission section below. The abstract should describe the key motivation of their research, the major contribution (either actual or expected, depending on the research stage), the research methodology, and the current status of the work.

As in prior years, the Doctoral Symposium will employ a mentoring program in which every author of an accepted paper will be paired with an experienced mentor from the community. Mentors will help introduce the student to the community, offer extended discussion of their research objectives and career opportunities, and will host their student throughout the event to help them gain the best experience from an international conference.

Important Dates

Submissions

Submissions should use the standard IEEE Computer Society Press proceedings style guide and should be a maximum of 2 pages long, with an extra page permitted for references. Authors should submit their abstracts to EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acsos2026 selecting the “PhD Symposium track” track.

As in previous years, the Doctoral Symposium focuses on the work of a specific PhD student, therefore, please note that only single-author submissions are permitted, with the name of the PhD supervisor(s) included below that of the author. All submissions should have the following specific structure:

• Overall problem and motivation: Explain why this research is important, and identify the key research question(s) and challenges that have yet to be addressed by the community. Explain the relevance of the problem to autonomic computing, self-adaptation and/or self-organization.
• Objectives and contribution: Present the detailed goals of your research, highlighting why your work is novel in comparison to existing research, and then present the main contributions of the research.
• Methods and results: Present the scientific methods used to tackle the research problem, discussing their suitability to the problem and contribution. Present any preliminary or expected results, including a statement about the current status of your work and the open questions and challenges that you are facing.
• Future work and research plan: Summarise your intended future work and provide a schedule of milestones for the next steps, including a plan for evaluation of the PhD results.

The submitted paper will be evaluated by the Doctoral Symposium Program Committee according to the following criteria:

• its relevance to ACSOS;
• the quality of the submission, including clarity, precision, and adequacy of the problem statement and critical reflection of the work.

Authors of accepted submissions will prepare a final (camera-ready) version of their abstract, taking into account reviewers’ feedback. Doctoral Symposium papers will be submitted to IEEE Xplore as part of the ACSOS proceedings and will be made available in the IEEE Digital Library.