ICSE 2015 call for contributions to

New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER)

Goals

The goal of NIER 2015 is to encourage radical new directions that represent disruptive innovations in the making, which can challenge the status quo of the software engineering discipline.

To support that goal, NIER 20’15 will publish three kinds of papers:

1. Reflections (on the past) such as:
   • Startling results that call into question current research directions;
   • Bold arguments on current research directions that may be somehow misguided;
   • Results that disregard established results or beliefs of evidence that call for fundamentally new directions.
2. Initiatives (recently funded new ideas):
   • Summaries of newly awarded, highly innovative, large multi-year research grants.
3. Visions (of the future):
   • Bold visions of new directions which may not yet be supported by solid results but rather by a strong and well motivated scientific intuition. An example of such a vision can be unusual synergies with other disciplines, or the importance of software engineering in problems whose software engineering aspects have not been studied earlier.

NIER submissions must clearly motivate and illustrate a rationale for changing current practice and/or research in software engineering.

The writing style can even be narrative to the extent where this supports the motivation for an emerging research direction. 

Note that evaluation results are not required for NIER papers (but if such results exist, then they may optionally be presented, if only to give the reviewers a feel about the evaluation plan).

Scope

NIER provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking research in software engineering in order to accelerate the exposure of the community to early yet promising and potentially inspiring research efforts.

NIER papers are not second-class ICSE research track papers. NIER is a forum for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated research directions and emerging results.

In principle, the track addresses the same topics of interest as those of the technical research paper track. However, NIER authors are encouraged to combine these topics in new ways, to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software engineering, as well as to argue for the importance of software engineering research in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of scope

A NIER submission should not be a position statement, ICSE research submissions lacking an evaluation, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results. For such out-of-scope submissions, authors should consider submitting to the main ICSE conference, one of the many ICSE workshops, or one of the satellite ICSE conferences.

Also, an ICSE research track submission with slightly less evaluation is not a good NIER paper. NIER papers are fundamentally different in nature.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria.

• Value: the problem is worth exploring;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice;
• Originality: of the paper's insight;
• Synergy : the paper appropriately connects a set of things that were previously treated separately;
• Validity: soundness of the rationale;
• Scholarship: appropriate consideration of relevant literature;
• Quality : overall paper quality;
• Surprise: startling and unexpected findings.

How to submit

In the submission form, authors must clearly identify their paper as one of

• Reflections (on the past);
• Initiatives (recently funded research projects);
• Visions (of the future).

A NIER submission must conform at the time of submission to the ICSE 2015 submission and formatting instructions, and must not exceed four pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. NIER papers must be submitted electronically at the NIER EasyChair submission site ( https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icse15nier ) , by the submission deadline.

Submissions that do not comply with the instructions and size limits may be rejected without review.

Note that authors of accepted papers are also required to submit a poster describing their work.

Authors will present their work via a talk and a poster sessions.

Important dates 

Submission deadline: November 21st, 2014.

Notification to authors: January 21st, 2015.

Camera ready deadline: February 13th, 2015.

Import dates in your calendar 

 

If you have any questions about the suitability of  a paper, please contact the co-chairs Tim Menzies or Abhik Roychoudhury

 

NIER Committee

Tim Menzies (Co-Chair)		North Carolina State University, United States
Abhik Roychoudhury (Co-Chair)		National University of Singapore
Mathieu Acher		University of Rennes I / INRIA
Nelly Bencomo		School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, UK
Marcel Böhme		Saarland University
Margaret Burnett		Oregon State University
Vittorio Cortellessa		Universita' dell'Aquila
Bradley Cossette		University of Calgary
Eduardo Cunha De Almeida		Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR)
Serge Demeyer		Universiteit Antwerpen (ANSYMO)
Danny Dig		Oregon State University
Alexander Egyed		Johannes Kepler University
Franck Fleurey		SINTEF
Xavier Franch		Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Smita Ghaisas		Tata Research Design and Development Center
Sudipto Ghosh		Dept of Computer Science, Colorado State University
Mike Godfrey		University of Waterloo
Sol Greenspan		NSF
William G.J.Halfond		University of Southern California
Ross Jeffery		UNSW & NICTA
Xiaoping Jia		Depaul University
Aditya Kanade		Indian Institute of Science
Jacques Klein		University of Luxembourg
Philippe Kruchten		University of British Columbia
Shuvendu Lahiri		Microsoft Research
Claire Le Goues		Carnegie Mellon University
Seok-Won Lee		Ajou University
Patricia Machado		Federal University of Campina Grande
Hausi A.Muller		University of Victoria
Nan Niu		Mississippi State University
James Noble		Victoria University of Wellington
Srinivas Padmanabhuni		Infosys Technologies Ltd
Liliana Pasquale		Lero - The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
Anna Perini		Fondazione Bruno Kessler - IRST- Italy
Martin Pinzger		University of Klagenfurt
Raghu Reddy		International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Roshanak Roshandel		Seattle University
Subhajit Roy		Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Houari Sahraoui		DIRO, Université De Montréal
Santonu Sarkar		Infosys Technologies Ltd
Forrest Shull		Software Engineering Institute, USA
Jun Sun		Singapore University of Technology and Design
Tetsuo Tamai		Hosei University
Sira Vegas		Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
Lu Zhang		Peking University
Jian Zhang		Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences