Colorado mountains

OOPSLA`99 again will host a selected group of Ph.D. students with a symposium in which to present their work and to obtain guidance from experienced researchers. The symposium will expose the doctoral students early on to external helpful but critical peers in order to improve upon their thesis work, as well as giving points of advise for job interviews. Past symposiums have benefited the participants greatly, in that their responses had been unanimously quite positive.

The symposium will take place from 8:30 AM on Nov. 2, the second day of OOPSLA`99. Nine doctoral students have been selected as presenters from 20 applicants, according to various criteria including the quality of their research, the expected benefits from the symposium, and how far along they are in their thesis work, etc. They will be presenting their research in a closed session to four Doctoral Symposium faculties (called mentors), other presenters, as well as "observer" students who have also been selected from the applicants. Due to the mentoring nature of the event, the symposium itself will only be open to those selected for participation. However, most of the symposium presenters will also have poster presentations, so OOPSLA attendees will have the opportunity of meet the students and discuss their research.

Mentors have traditionally been selected from respected individuals in the OOPSLA community, such as past/present program chairs, seasoned members of the program committee, symposium organizers, workshop leaders, etc. Their mission is not only to be constructively critical about the current status of the work, but also to give advice to where the work should further focus and stress, the future direction for successful completion of the doctoral work, as well as some points of advice for job interviews. In the past symposiums, some mentors have attained close research relationships with the then doctoral students, who have gone on to become established researchers themselves, resulting in continuum of research collaborations. This year's mentors are as follows:

• Craig Chambers, University of Washington
• Gregor Kiczales, Xerox PARC
• Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Symposium Chair)
• Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Bern

The students participating are advanced enough to have a specific research proposal and some preliminary results, but with sufficient time remaining to thesis completion to benefit from the symposium experience. They will be receiving several benefits from OOPSLA, including the traditional "doctoral symposium dinner", in order to encourage their participation for the future of the object-oriented community in general. This year's presenters are as follows:

• "Automatic Configuration of Component-Based Distributed Systems",
  Fabio Kon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), advisor Roy H. Campbell.
• "The Collaborative Software Process",
  Laurie Williams (University of Utah), advisor Robert R. Kessler.
• "Translation, Validation and Optimization in Object-Oriented Languages",
  Olivier Zendra (University Henri Poincarn), advisor Dominique Colnet.
• "A Dynamic Integration Model for Componentware Systems",
  Renato Fontoura de Gusmao Cerqueira (PUC-Rio), advisors Roberto Lerusalimschy and Noemi Rodriguez.
• "Design as an Explicit Abstraction of Implementation",
  Roel Wuyts (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), advisor Theo D'Hondt.
• "A QoS aware Binding Facility for Distributed Multimedia Systems",
  Oyvind Hanssen (University of Tromso), advisor Frank Eliassen.
• "The Efficiency of Distributed Object Models",
  Juric Branko-Matjaz (University of Maribor), advisors Ivan Rozman, Bruno Stiglic, and Matjaz Gams.
• "Support for Persistent Object Stores Distributed over Wide Area Networks",
  Susan Spence (University of Glasgow), advisor Malcolm Atkinson.
• "Learning Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Case Study: A Minimalist Approach",
  Hope D. Harley (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University), advisor Mary Beth Rosson.

Further specifics of the symposium can be found on the OOPSLA doctoral symposium web page, especially the doctoral symposium "frequently asked questions" compiled for the first time this year.