Proceedings of the IBM PhD Student Symposium at ICSOC 2007

The IBM Ph.D. Student Symposium at ICSOC provides a forum where doctoral students conducting research in Service-Oriented Computing (SoC) have the opportunity to present their on-going dissertation work to a group of well-known experts in the field and receive feedback from them. Each presentation is organized as a mock thesis-defense, with a committee of 4 mentors providing extensive feedback and advice for completing a successful Ph.D. thesis. This format is similar to the one adopted by the doctoral symposia associated with ICSE, OOPSLA, ECOOP, Middleware and ISWC.

The closing session of the symposium is a panel discussion where the roles are reversed: the mentors answer the students' questions about research careers in industry and academia. The symposium agenda also contains a keynote speech, delivered by Dr. Paolo Traverso, addressing the "hot topics" and new research challenges in SoC. Dr. Traverso is director of research at IRST, Italy, where he leads a division working on software and services, knowledge management, and embedded systems. He was Program Committee Chair at ICSOC 2004 and General Chair at ICSOC 2005.

This year we have received 17 submissions from 11 countries and 4 continents: 11 from Europe, 3 from North America, 2 from Asia and 1 from South America. As the goal of the symposium is to provide constructive feedback to the authors of both accepted and rejected papers, each paper was reviewed by three Program Committee members (we did not use external reviewers). The submissions were evaluated according to five criteria: quality of research, breadth of background knowledge, relevance to SoC, presentation and project maturity. The program committee has finally selected 7 papers with different maturity levels, guided by the belief that the students presenting their work in the symposium learn from the feedback of the mentors, but also from each other, and that Ph.D. students who are almost ready to graduate set a good example for their peers who are just starting. The papers included in these proceedings address, from both technical and business perspectives, a range of topics including service discovery, composition, interoperability and the establishment of service agreements.