MODELS 2017 Doctoral Symposium Summary
                                                Nelly Bencomo∗ , Julia Rubin† ,
                                          ∗ Aston University, UK, Email: nelly@acm.org
                              † TUniversity of British Columbia, Canada, Email: mjulia@ece.ubc.ca




   Abstract—The Doctoral Symposium at MODELS 2017 brought              Session: Features and Product Lines
together nine (9) doctoral students and at least eight (8) mentors   - Xin Zhao. Feature-oriented Modeling for Collaborative
who volunteered to spend a day discussing student research pre-      Virtual Environment Construction
sentations. A truly international representation among students
and mentors provided a diverse opportunity to offer suggestions      - Sanaa Alwidian. Modeling Language Evolution for Model
and advice regarding the direction and vision of the student PhD     Family Support
ideas. In this document, we summarised the activities and digest
the topics discussed during the Symposium.                             Session: Discussion Panel
                                                                     Best and Worst of Doctoral Studies. Antonio Vallecillo,
                      I. I NTRODUCTION
                                                                     Dimitris Kolovos, Eugene Syriani, Sahar Kokaly, Shahar
   The Doctoral Symposium at the MODELS conference took              Maoz.
place at the Sheraton Austin Hotel at the Capitol in Austin on       Closing Session
Tuesday, September 19th 2017. The Symposium provided an
international venue for PhD students to interact with academic          The Symposium organisers worked hard to provide useful
mentors, other students and MODELS attendees. The Sympo-             guidance for completion of the research and also initiation of a
sium brought together PhD students working in areas related          research career. The mentors comprising the organising com-
to model-driven engineering applied on different domains. The        mittee included the following: Betty Cheng, Michigan State
PhD students had the opportunity to present and to discuss           University, USA (who was also our keynote speaker), Silvia
their research goals, techniques and preliminary results within      Abraho, Antonio Vallecillo, Sahar Kokaly, Shahar Maoz, and
a constructive and internationally diverse atmosphere. The           Eugene Syriani.
Symposium was intended for students who already settled on              At the end of the day we continued our academic con-
a specific research proposal with some preliminary results,          versations and discussions during an agreeable more informal
but still had enough time remaining before their final defence       dinner environment.
so that they could benefit from the Symposium discussions.
However, there was a student in very initial steps who also                              II. M ENTOR A DVICE
also got benefits from the Symposium and contributed to the             During lunch time, a group of PhD students were allocated
Symposium. The event was open to everybody. Every student            in a table with at least a couple of mentors to be able to
offered a formal presentation.                                       talk about their research and general advice regarding doctoral
   The participating PhD students, along with the titles of their    research and career advancement.
presentations and their affiliation were:
                                                                                           III. C ONCLUSION
   Session: Requirements and Testing
- Jose Bocanegra. Towards a Model-Driven Approach for                   The fruitful exchange among mentors and PhD students
Context-Aware Software                                               at the Symposium provided mutual benefit toward address-
- Mohammed Al-Refai. Improving Model-Based Regression                ing promising research ideas for future exploration. Among
Test Selection                                                       the mentors, it was agreed that there are many future
- Danielle Gaither. Verification of Nonfunctional                    stars among the student participants and that it will be
Requirements Using Formal Semantics                                  exciting to watch all of their careers unfold. The Doc-
- Alexey Tazin. UML Class Diagram Composition using                  toral Symposium will be continue as an annual event at
Software Requirements Specifications                                 the MODELS conference to foster students and provid-
                                                                     ing such mentoring opportunities. Additional information
   Session: Distributed Systems                                      about the workshop, including pictures of the activities,
- David Oudart. Model Driven Design of IT Systems for                can be found at: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/m̃julia/MODELS17-
Smart Grids                                                          DS/call for ds papers.html.
- Anirban Bhattacharjee. MDE-based Automated Provisioning
and Management of Cloud Applications
- Yogesh Barve. Model Driven Techniques for Distributed
Simulations Deployments