Spring School

At the AOSD.06 Spring School, we accompany you for a little while on the journey that is to be your thesis. Since we don't want to interfere with the regular workshops and tutorials at the AOSD conference, which are excellent platforms for getting feedback on your work at the technical level, the Spring School will be held on the Sunday preceding the conference.

In the morning, the Spring School kicks off with presentations by AOSD experts on four different sub fields: analysis and design, formal methods, languages and applications. This allows you to get an accurate idea of the state of the art in AOSD and gives you pointers to related work. This part of the Spring School is organized in collaboration with AOSD-Europe, the European Network of Excellence on AOSD.

Sunday afternoon is dedicated to interactive sessions. Experts on AOSD will be invited to give feedback on your work, not only on the content, but on the motivation, the evaluation, related work, foundational work and so on. The rest of the day will be spent on discussing issues—questions, worries and pitfalls—concerning your thesis or research on AOSD in general. We will collect these issues from you and other students beforehand, and from AOSD experts that have experience with advising students and conducting research themselves. The discussion will be preceded by a panel of international experts in order to warm up the crowd.

Example issues are:

• When have I done enough of a literature study?
• How do I identify and formulate precisely my contributions?
• Is my timing and planning feasible?
• Are negative results also contributions?
• How do I evaluate and validate my work?
• What's the difference between foundational work and related work?
• Am I doing engineering research or scientific research?
• How can I get useful and constructive feedback from the people who are guiding or advising me?

Note that we encourage you to attend both the Spring School and the Poster Event, since both events are related.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Submission Guidelines

If you are a student working on a thesis or a major project in AOSD, we would like to encourage you to participate in the Spring School. We welcome combined submissions for both the Spring School and the Poster Event.

In order to be one of the participants, please submit a two page overview including:

• Your research hypothesis: this is one sentence stating the assumption(s) you make, which you are going to address in your work. Note that for beginning researchers this sentence can be rather vague and broad, whereas for students nearing the deadline of their thesis this is probably a very precise and concrete statement.
• A list of the contributions you (expect to) make
• Your three main important question, worries, pitfalls, ... These can be taken from, but are not limited to, the list above.

Submission Instructions

Send your submission to the organizers, Maja D'Hondt and Yvonne Coady, at extravaganzaaosd.net. Then, all you have to do is be ready to share this part of your journey with others!