Call for Doctoral Consortium Papers

Consult the ACM UMAP 2026 general call for full and short papers concerning relevant topics and formatting instructions. 

Each proposal should be a single PDF document, containing:

1. Research description: use the ACM template for formatting (see below for instructions; 4 pages plus references) and follow the content outline provided here.
2. 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 2026 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 2026. If you are unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from your dissertation advisor, please include a short explanation. 
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,anonymous]{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,anonymous]{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, ignoring the single-column instructions and the single-column submission template. Please use the double-column Word template.

Plagiarism and use of AI policy. Plagiarized papers will not be accepted. Our committees will be checking the plagiarism level of all submitted papers to ensure content originality using an automated tool. If you reuse non-novel text from a prior publication (e.g., the description of an algorithm or dataset), please be sure to cite the prior publication as the source of that text. If you have questions about the reuse of text or simultaneous submission, please contact the program chairs at least one week prior to the submission deadline. Please refer to the ACM Publishing License Agreement and Authorship Policy for further details.

Authors must follow the ACM Policy on the use of generative AI software tools. If a paper includes material generated by GenAI tools (such as text produced by large language models like ChatGPT), it is essential to disclose the extent and nature of this use in a section titled “Acknowledgments”. This allows reviewers to evaluate the overall rigor of the research methodology. However, the use of AI tools for editing and refining authors’ work—meaning tasks like grammar checks, word autocorrect, and other light editing—does not require disclosure. Authors who choose to utilize GenAI tools are fully responsible for any inaccuracies, biases, plagiarism, and other violations, just as if they had created the content themselves. Submissions that are primarily produced by GenAI without substantial contributions from the authors are prohibited and considered spam. Only humans are permitted to be authors of submitted papers.

Papers violating any of the above guidelines are subject to rejection without review and cases may be referred to the ACM Publications Ethics and Plagiarism committee for further action where warranted.

Accessibility. Authors 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. All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically. ACM UMAP has a no dual submission policy, which is why submitted manuscripts should not be currently under review at another publication venue. Particularly, 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 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.”

“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.”