Call for PhD Symposium – The Web Conference 2027

We invite submissions of PhD Symposium contributions to The Web Conference 2027 (formerly known as WWW).

The Web Conference is the premier conference focused on understanding the current state and the evolution of the Web through the lens of different disciplines, including computing, computational social science, economics and political sciences.

The PhD Symposium at The Web Conference 2027 in Dublin, Ireland, invites PhD students to submit their ongoing research on topics relevant to the conference. The symposium provides a unique opportunity for doctoral students to present their work to a panel of experts and peers, and to receive feedback and guidance. We encourage submissions from students at all stages of their PhD studies, but we will prioritize students, who can benefit from the PhD Symposium.

The symposium is particularly interested in research that addresses:

  • The evolution of the Web and its societal impact
  • Innovations in Web-based technologies and applications
  • The use of AI and language models on the Web
  • Agentic AI and its Web Applications
  • The Web of Things (WoT) and its future development
  • Security, privacy, and trust in the digital world
  • Social developments and their impact on the web

Important Dates

Paper Submission06 January 2027
Notification01 February 2027
Final Version Deadline14 February 2027

All submission deadlines are end-of-day in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Submission Guidelines & Requirements

Submissions must be written in English, in double-column format, and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf). Word users may use the Word Interim Template. The recommended setting for LaTeX is:

\documentclass[sigconf, screen, review]{acmart}

A submission must be a single PDF file of at most 4 (four) pages, including references. 

Papers must be submitted through the WWW2027 OpenReview instance (select the PhD Symposium track). All submissions must be single-author, non-anonymous, and focus on the student’s doctoral research. The name of the supervisor must be included in the acknowledgements.

Templates

Please use the official ACM Proceedings Template (LaTeX/Word). An Overleaf version is available here: ACM templates on Overleaf.

The paper should include the following sections:

  1. Problem statement: What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
  2. Importance: Why is this problem important and for whom? Who will benefit and who should care? What is the impact of solving this problem (for the research community, or society in general)?
  3. Related work: Has a solution to this problem been attempted before, and how? If you are addressing an existing problem, what are the limitations of current solutions? What are you adding that is novel? Why? If not, have research efforts addressed or solved similar or analogous problems? What can you learn from these efforts?
  4. Research question(s) and hypotheses: What research questions do you plan to explore? What hypotheses do you make in formulating your solution?
  5. Preliminary results: Do you have any preliminary results that inform your research questions or hypotheses? If so, what are these results, and what do they reveal? Else, skip this section.
  6. Evaluation: How will you know you’ve answered your question(s)? What are the methods you applied or will apply to test your hypotheses? Have you identified criteria to measure the degree of success of your solution?
  7. Reflection and future work: Are there any limitations in your approach? What are your planned next steps to complete your investigation?” 

Note that the submission template will ask you to argue how you will benefit from attending the doctoral consortium.

Authorship

Submissions are not anonymous, hence the PhD author should list their name and affiliations.The student should be the sole author of the submission. The supervisor(s) should be acknowledged at the end of the submission, together with a funding agency or any other party that supports or contributes to the research.  You can use AI to support translation, grammar checking, rephrasing, and improvements to clarity, but not for content generation. Authors will be responsible for all content submitted.

Reviewing

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the PhD Symposium Committee based on the clarity and significance of the research problem, originality and potential contribution, soundness of the research plan, progress appropriate to the stage of the PhD, relevance to the conference community, quality of presentation, and potential to benefit from feedback at the symposium. The review process will be single-blind.

The PhD Symposium will be a full-day event held during the main conference week. Accepted students will present their work in a dedicated session, followed by a Q&A session with a panel of mentors. The symposium will also include opportunities for networking and one-on-one discussions with senior researchers and industry professionals.

There will be some travel grants for PhD Symposium attendees, subject to successful grant application through our travel-grant system. We will provide updates on that at a later stage (check the web pages as well). 

Each accepted proposal requires a full conference registration (at a PhD Symposium rate) which must be paid by the camera-ready deadline. All DS presenters are expected to attend the conference in person.

Publication and Presentation Policies

Publication

Each accepted paper can be included in the Companion Proceedings of The Web Conference 2027. You have the option to opt out.

Presentation

A big part of PhD Symposium participation is personal feedback. Hence, every accepted paper must be presented in person at the conference. No-show papers may be withdrawn.

ACM Open Access

The ACM Open program is designed to help institutions actively support Open Access publishing. ACM is proud to share that ~3,000 institutions worldwide are already participating , covering approximately 76% of all ACM conference papers. To be included in ACM Open, the corresponding author must be affiliated with a participating institution. A list of all ACM Open participating institutions can be found here. For APC-eligible articles, including research papers, short papers, and survey papers, where none of the authors are currently affiliated with a participating institution, an APC will be required.

To support authors and institutions that are still adapting to ACM’s Open Access publishing model, the ACM Council has approved subsidised APC rates for 2027. Authors whose institutions are not yet participating in ACM Open will pay a discounted rate of $500 (ACM/SIG Members) or $750 (Non-Members). We encourage authors to help bring their institutions into ACM Open during 2027, as ACM’s temporary APC subsidy is scheduled to end after this year.

Please note that ACM is not lowering APC pricing. Rather, ACM is providing a one-year subsidy for 2027 that reduces APC pricing for authors whose institutions are not yet participating in ACM Open. 2027 will be the final year of this subsidy and in the future APC pricing will be based on the actual cost of publishing and hosting articles in the ACM Digital Library. It is possible that APC prices will go up or down in the future.

PhD Symposium Chairs

phdsymposium-www2027@acm.org

– Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich, Switzerland
– Flora Salim, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia
– Josiane Mothe, Univ. Toulouse, UT2J, IRIT/CLLE CNRS, France
– Miriam Fernandez, Open University, UK