Program Overview
The PhD Consortium at KDD 2023 is an initiative that aims to provide a platform for PhD students to share their works and thesis plans to a broad audience. We believe this initiative will be helpful for PhD students to seek advice and talk to peers or senior researchers for feedback, suggestions and mentoring. Towards this goal, the PhD Consortium Program will:
- Provide a PhD consortium research submission track which will be used to both provide critical feedback to graduate students on their research projects and thesis plans. A subset of students that will receive financial assistance to attend and present their work at KDD 2023.
- Organize student poster sessions at KDD 2023, along with participating reviewers that will provide additional feedback on their talks.
- Match participating students with academic and industry mentors that can provide them feedback on their research plans, PhD thesis and future career advice.
- Organize a panel focused on rewards, potential challenges, opportunities of different career pathways and research directions in both academia and industry.
The KDD PhD Consortium will accept paper submissions from only students who are actively enrolled in a PhD program. PhD students who work on various topics broadly related to knowledge discovery and data mining are eligible for submission. The PhD student who is submitting to the PhD Consortium should be the primary authors of the paper, and other authors and their advisor can be co-authors.
Preference will be given to students who identify with underrepresented groups in the field of computing and/or students who have limited resources related to graduate school at their home institutions. We encourage submissions from both senior PhD students as well as junior PhD students who just started writing research papers and are in the early stages of planning their PhD thesis.
Panels
The goal of the panel session is to facilitate interactions between junior PhD students, senior PhD students, industry researchers and professors. During the panel, PhD students can ask questions related but not limited to PhD studies in general.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: May 26th
Decision: June 20th
Travel award and oral notification: July 8th
Consortium date (tentative): Aug 8th
Application Submission
Applications must be submitted in full via the submission portal by 11:59:59 pm UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth) on the stated deadline date. Application materials should not be anonymized.
Please submit the following materials using the following submission portal:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/KDDPhDConsortium2023
Application Materials
Research paper
The research paper can be anywhere between 3-6 pages, excluding references, using the ACM Conference Proceeding templates (two column format). References are limited to 1 page. Template guidelines are available here: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template.
The authors can further provide supplementary materials (Appendix PDF) focused on reproducibility. Anonymous code repository links are also highly recommended. The PhD student must be the leading author of the paper. Once the paper has been submitted, the list of authors cannot be changed.
CV
Please include the student’s CV between 1-2 pages. Clearly describe the student’s background, research publications and other experiences (education, employment, open-source projects etc.). The list of publications need to include the venue, year and author list. Mark submissions as pending if it’s currently in submission to a conference / journal.
Personal Statement
Please submit a 1-page personal statement. Personal statement formatting requirements: standard 8.5″x 11″ page size, Times New Roman font for all text, no smaller than 11-point (except text that is part of an image), 1″ margins on all sides, and no less than single spacing (approximately 6 lines per inch). The personal statement should contain information about your research direction, potential thesis topics, your past achievements (publications, internships, teaching or other experiences related to research), and what advice / insights / ideas you hope to gain from the PhD consortium. If applicable, it is recommended to mention some of the questions that you might be interested to ask during the panel session at the PhD consortium.
Review Criteria
Applications will be reviewed according to the following criteria:
- Clarity and completeness of the submission packet;
- Significance of the student’s research contribution in the submitted research paper (a double-blind review will be performed);
- Reproducibility of the submission and contribution to the research community;
- Utility of the PhD Consortium participation and mentorship in support of the student’s continuing in graduate studies related to knowledge discovery and data mining;
- Assessment of how the student can contribute to others participating in the PhD Consortium.
Accepted applicants who also attend the PhD consortium will have their papers posted on the KDD website. Additionally, a selected subset of the students will be invited to present their papers orally during the PhD consortium, while the rest will be invited to present their work in a poster session. Students who are participating will be able to apply for the KDD travel award, in exchange for volunteering a few hours of their time at the conference. The maximum amount of support provided to each grantee is set by the sponsors (ACM SIGKDD, NSF), and they are intended to partially cover the grantee’s expenses. Conference registration will be waived for all student travel awardees. Travel may or may not be partially covered depending on the total availability of funds and the number of awards given.
Acknowledgement
Support for the 2023 PhD Consortium is graciously provided by ACM SIGKDD and the National Science Foundation.
For more information
Please refer to this page for more updates regarding the PhD Consortium at KDD. For additional questions, please email KDD23-PhD-Chairs@acm.org.