The goal of the Doctoral Symposium was to provide a forum in which PhD students could present their work in progress and to foster the role of MoDELS as a premier venue for research in model-driven engineering. The symposium supported students by providing independent and constructive feedback about their already completed and, more importantly, planned research work. The symposium was accompanied by prominent experts in the field of model-driven engineering. Submissions exclusively authored by the PhD student were invited from students who had settled on a PhD topic, but were still sufficiently far away from completion to be able to take full advantage of the given feedback. Typically, this meant that, at the time of the symposium, students were be at least one year away from completion. Each submission was reviewed by at least members of the selection committee based on originality, significance, correctness and clarity. Submissions described research-in-progress using the following structure.
Problem: The problem the research intends to solve, the target audience of this research, and a motivation of why the problem is important and needs to be solved.
Related work: A review of the relevant related work with an emphasis of how the proposed approach is different and what advantages it has over the existing state of the art.
Proposed solution: A description of the proposed solution and which other work (e.g., in the form of methods or tools) it depends on.
Preliminary work: A description of the work to-date and results achieved so far. Expected contributions: A list of the expected contributions to both theory and practice. Plan for evaluation and validation: A description of how it will be shown that the work does indeed solve the targeted problem and is superior to the existing state of the art (e.g., prototyping, industry case studies, user studies, experiments). Current status: The current status of the work and a planned timeline for completion.
The selection committee mainly consisted of the PhD students who had accepted contributions at the MoDELS 2012 Doctoral Symposium, supported by further experts in the field. In particular Antonio Vallecillo and Yvan Labiche provided additional help and insights. The presentations at the symposium gave a very good overview on the plans of the students. Each accepted contribution was assigned a ‘commenter’ from the other presenters at the symposium in order to start the following lively discussions.
Thanks to all involved researchers: Selection committee members, submitters, additional reviewers, and experts contributing to the discussions during the event. It was a pleasure and it was fun to work with you.