Call for Doctoral Consortium Applications

Format and Content Guidelines. Consult the ACM UMAP 2025 general call for full and short papers concerning the key topics of this call as well. Each proposal should be a single PDF document, with three required components: (i) a recommendation letter, (ii) a description of your doctoral path, (iii) and a curriculum vitae. If you are unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from your dissertation advisor, please include a short explanation. Specifically, for each component, please consider the following instructions:

1. Letter of Recommendation (from your primary dissertation advisor, in any format). Please note that the DC targets students who have a clear idea of their research plans and have started their research but have not yet executed a majority of their research. Please explain how the ACM UMAP 2025 doctoral consortium would benefit this student at this point in their doctoral program, as well as the contributions you expect the student to make to the group.  Please explain the expected level of progress by June 2025.
2. Research description (5 pages at most including references; figures, tables, proofs, appendixes, acknowledgments, and any other content count toward the page limit): using a double-column manuscript formatted according to the guidelines discussed below, please include the following:
   • Your name, advisor(s) name(s), and the university where you are conducting your doctoral work.
   • Current year of study and projected completion date (plus information about the regulations of your doctoral program regarding length, any part-time study, etc.).
   • Context and motivation for your research.
   • Key related work that frames your research.
   • Specific research objectives, goals, or questions.
   • Research approach, methods, and rationale.
   • Results and contributions to date.
   • Expected next steps.
   • Dissertation status and long-term goals.
3. Curriculum vitae (2 pages at most, in any format): a concise summary of your current curriculum vitae, including research publications. Clearly separate published papers from those under review or in press.

Please ensure that your submission is complete and conforms to the format and content guidelines above. Submissions that do not meet these requirements will be desk-rejected.

Single-Blind Policy. Proposals will be reviewed single-blind and, therefore, do not need to be anonymized before submission.

Template for the Research Description. Following the ACM Publication Workflow, all authors should submit manuscripts for review in the ACM double-column format. Instructions for authors are given below:

• LaTeX: Please use the latest version of the Primary Article Template – LaTeX to create your submission. Start the document with the \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart} command to generate the output in a double-column format. Please see the LaTeX documentation and ACM’s LaTeX best practices guide for further instructions, ignoring the single-column instructions. Do not use the “manuscript” option, otherwise, the document will not be compiled in double-column, as required. Check the sample-sigconf.tex file included in the template package for a formatting example. To ensure 100% compatibility with The ACM Publishing System (TAPS), please restrict the use of packages to the whitelist of approved LaTeX packages.
• Overleaf: (use \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart} for double-column). Please carefully follow the ACM’s instructions for preparing your article with Overleaf.
• Word: Please carefully follow the ACM’s instructions for preparing your article with Microsoft Word

Should you have any questions or issues going through the instructions above, please contact support at acmtexsupport@aptaracorp.com for LaTeX and Microsoft Word inquiries.

Accessibility. DC students are strongly encouraged to provide “alt text” (alternative text) for floats (images, tables, etc.) in their content so that readers with disabilities can be given descriptive information for these floats that are important to the work. The descriptive text will be displayed in place of a float if the float cannot be loaded. This benefits the author and it broadens the reader base for the author’s work. Moreover, the alt text provides in-depth float descriptions to search engine crawlers, which helps to properly index these floats. Additionally, authors should follow the ACM Accessibility Recommendations for Publishing in Color and SIG ACCESS guidelines on describing figures.

Submission Policy. Please consider the following ACM’s publication policies:

1. “By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.”
2. “Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.”

Camera-ready Information. Accepted proposals (i.e., the research description component) will require a further revision in order to meet the requirements and the page limits of the camera-ready format required by ACM. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of the papers will be provided after acceptance. We strongly recommend the usage of LaTeX/Overleaf for the camera-ready papers to minimize the extent of reformatting. Users of the Word template must use either the version for Microsoft Word for Windows, Macintosh Office 2011, or Macintosh Office 2016 (other formats such as Open Office, etc., are not admitted) for the camera-ready submission to avoid incompatibility issues.