PhD Retreat – Call for Submissions
The ICSOB 2026 PhD Retreat is an exciting one-day event designed to bring together PhD students who work on research related to software-intensive business. The PhD Retreat provides a friendly and constructive environment for PhD students to present their research proposal as well as intermediate results, and to discuss them with experts and other students in the same field.
PhD Retreat, Posters & Demos Track papers will be published in the companion proceedings of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Target Audience
PhD students should consider participating in this PhD Retreat if they have already identified a topic to focus their PhD thesis on and have a proposed methodological plan (early-stage PhD students). The PhD Retreat also invites PhD students who are in the mid-stage progress of their thesis (mid-stage PhD students). However, the PhD Retreat is NOT suitable for PhD students at the end of their PhD and who have completed all of their research activities.
The main goals of the PhD Retreat are to provide an opportunity for PhD students to:
- Interact and exchange ideas with researchers, practitioners and other PhD students in the software-business research community;
- Receive constructive feedback on their current and future research;
- Develop a critical discussion about their work with experts;
- Present their work as a poster at the ICSOB 2026 poster track;
- Build your research network and have fun!
The PhD Retreat will take place at a special location in Gothenburg, Sweden. Further details will be announced as they become available.
Submission Categories
We welcome two categories of submission:
Early-stage PhD submission: This category refers to PhD students who have an initial idea about their research topic and design, and are looking for early feedback on how to proceed with their PhD thesis.
Mid-stage PhD submission: This category refers to PhD students who have already started the implementation of their research with some preliminary results, and are looking for feedback before completing their PhD thesis.
Important Dates
Note: all deadlines are AoE (Anywhere on Earth) — 12 hours behind UTC.
- Deadline for submissions: September 7, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: September 21, 2026
- Camera-ready submission: November 30, 2026
Submission Guidelines
The PhD Retreat submission must consist of two elements:
1. Supervisor letter: A letter from the PhD student's supervisor including the current state of the PhD student's research and the expected date to complete the PhD thesis. The letter should be submitted via email to the PhD Retreat chairs (Rodrigo Santos: rps@uniriotec.br and Siamak Farshidi: siamak.farshidi@wur.nl).
2. Short paper: A paper that describes the PhD student's thesis. The short paper should not be anonymous and should meet the following requirements:
- Be authored only by the student and his/her supervisors;
- Clearly state the problem to be addressed in the student's thesis, and why this problem is important to be tackled (motivation);
- Discuss related work, and the knowledge gap in the literature that has been addressed in the thesis;
- Describe the research method and the evaluation plan of the results;
- Include the planned timeline for thesis completion;
- Present the results achieved so far (requested for the mid-stage PhD submission only);
- Explain the expected contributions of the thesis.
To address the items above, we suggest the following structure: Problem Definition, Knowledge Gap, Research Method, Timeline, Preliminary Results (if any), and Expected Contributions. All submissions must be written in English.
Students interested in participating in the PhD Retreat must submit a short paper (5-9 pages) using the CEUR-ART one-column template, available in Latex (CEURART.zip or Overleaf) or ODT (CEUR-Template-1col.odt) format. Accepted PhD Retreat submissions will be offered for publication by CEUR-WS.org (open access) in the ICSOB 2026 Companion Proceedings.
All submissions should be done through EasyChair at:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsob2026
Review Process
All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee members. The main evaluation criteria are scope, relevance, originality, soundness, accuracy, and clarity.
Presentation
Authors of the accepted submissions will have the opportunity to present their work in the PhD Retreat, and to have camera-ready versions of their papers published in the post-conference proceedings. The camera-ready deadline will be announced after the conference.
Each participant will have 10 to 15 minutes to present plus 10 to 15 minutes for answering questions. There will be networking breaks after blocks of presentations in which participants can get feedback and comments about their research in a more relaxed Q&A session. After running the presentations, a thesis-design workshop session with experts who will be acting as mentors for the participants during the session is planned.
In addition, authors will be invited to present their work at the poster track of the main conference to get more feedback from the conference attendees. This poster track will be an additional (optional) choice for the PhD Retreat participants, without the need to submit their research to the poster track.