Doctoral SymposiumSPLASH 2025

SPLASH Doctoral Symposium

The SPLASH Doctoral Symposium provides an interactive forum primarily aimed at mid-stage doctoral students who have progressed far enough in their research to have a structured proposal but will not be defending their dissertation in the next 12 months. Student proposals and presentations will be discussed and evaluated with the aim of providing important guidance for completing their dissertation research and beginning their research careers.

The symposium is a one-day event, structured around presentations of a student’s current research agenda and plans, with plentiful time for discussions and feedback from the program committee. Applications will be reviewed with a quick turnaround.

There is no formal restriction on how far through your doctoral studies you need to be to be considered mid-stage, except that you should not be planning to finish within the next 12 months. If you are at a very stage of your studies, you could also consider attending the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop.

Doctoral Symposium participants will automatically be considered for SIGPLAN’s John Vlissides award, which comes with a cash prize of $2,000.

In-Person Attendance

The Doctoral Symposium is primarily an in-person event. In special circumstances, consideration may be given to participants who cannot physically attend the symposium. As part of the application process, students will need to specify whether (and if so, why) they would need to participate remotely.

More Information

For additional information, clarification, or answers to questions please contact the Doctoral Symposium chair Conrad Watt.

Accepted Submissions

Call for Submissions

We invite students to submit a structured proposal of their dissertation research. At the symposium, presentations will consist of the following:

• A two-minute overview presentation stating the most critical issues of the research (the “elevator pitch”).
• A separate (strictly-timed) presentation slot for the description of the proposer’s research. The precise duration of this slot is not yet fixed, but it will be around 30-40 minutes, with at least 10 minutes of time dedicated to questions, discussions, and feedback from the committee and audience. The exact duration will depend on the number of accepted submissions and will be announced in due time.

The students whose proposals are selected for presentation are expected to participate in the event for the entire day, although exceptions can be made for students who are also presenting in parallel tracks.

Structure of Research Description

The research description in your submission and in your symposium presentation must be structured to include the following clearly-identifiable parts (possibly in a different order); you do not need to address every suggested question under the headings. If your submission concerns multiple projects, you’re encouraged to think about whether your presentation will be clearer / more compelling if you present these all together, or summarize their high-level connection and then focus on one or two main goals in your presentation.

1. Motivation: Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn’t obviously interesting it might be better to put motivation first, but if your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the “Problem” section first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful.

2. Problem: What exact problem, issue, or question does this research address? What limitations or failings of current understanding, knowledge, methods, or technologies does this research resolve? What new understanding, knowledge, methods, or technologies will this research generate? You should position your work with respect to related ideas in this section.

3. Approach: How have you gone about / do you plan to go about solving or making progress on the problem? Do you have a technical direction or plan already? Are the milestones or a roadmap? Where might the project fail to stick to your plan, and what might you do to mitigate or adapt to any difficulties or surprises?

4. Evaluation Methodology: What results are you hoping for, and how do they connect to your original problem and goals? What do you plan to evaluate, and how? What will count as success in this project? If your planned results are experimental in nature, what is your planned experimental design (including threats to validity)? If theoretical, how will you convey the evidence of your success? In all cases, how will you share and make your results reproducible?

In addition to your research description, your supervisor/advisor will need to send a recommendation email, which should include a description of your progress through your current PhD program.

Submission Format and Process

To apply for the doctoral symposium, please submit a description of your dissertation research, following the structure of research description described above, on the submission website: https://splash25ds.hotcrp.com/ by the submission deadline (end-of-day 31 July 2025 AOE). Your advisor must also send a very brief statement of your dissertation progress to date and a statement of recommendation to the Doctoral Symposium chair Conrad Watt by the same deadline. Please have your advisor use the following e-mail subject: [SPLASH ’25 Doctoral Symposium Recommendation for (name)].

Submissions should use the ACM SIGPLAN acmart style. See http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/. Please use the provided double-column LaTeX or Word templates. Your submission should not exceed 3 pages, including references and appendices (if applicable). You are not obliged to use the full space available.

Regardless of the length of your submission, your presentation should be sufficiently detailed to describe your dissertation research.