Objective The goal of the Doctoral Symposium is to provide a supportive setting in which Ph.D. students can present and receive feedback on their work. Students at different stages in their research will be able to present and discuss their problem statement, goals, methods and results. The forum aims to provide students with useful guidance on various aspects of their research from established researchers and other Ph.D. students working in research areas related to distributed event-based systems. Additionally, the forum aims to enable Ph.D. students to interact with other participants in order to stimulate an exchange of ideas, suggestions and experiences. The symposium welcomes submissions by Ph.D. candidates working on the topics of DEBS 2021. Accepted submissions will lead to a presentation during the doctoral symposium, and may additionally provide an opportunity to present a poster at the main conference. Short papers will be published in a Doctoral Symposium section of the DEBS proceedings. The choice of short papers is to ensure that future publications in conferences/journals are not precluded, while still providing an opportunity to receive citations. Accepted submissions will be made available electronically to all participants. Eligibility The forum is open to all Ph.D. students. Ph.D. students at the beginning of their research journey are particularly welcome when they have a well-defined problem statement and some ideas about the solution that they want to discuss. Ph.D. students in a more advanced stage of their research should still have sufficient time remaining before completing their dissertation to be able to benefit from feedback provided from participation in the DEBS Doctoral Symposium. Important Dates - Doctoral symposium paper submission **May 10th, 2021** - Notification of acceptance **May 24th, 2021** - Camera ready deadline **May 28th, 2021** - Conference **June 28th – July 2nd, 2021** Submission Guidelines Submissions should be written based on the following structure, which focuses on the key methodological components required for a sound research synthesis: - Problem: What is the core problem you are studying during your PhD? Why is it relevant? - Research setting: What are your research questions? Which hypotheses (Hypotheses must be falsifiable!) are you going to investigate? Which assumptions are you taking? - State of the art: Who worked on your problem (or a similar one) in the past? What are the main differences with regards to your research? - Research approach: What is your approach to investigate your research questions? How and why is it novel with respect to the existing state of the art? Which methodologies are you adopting? - Evaluation plan: How are you going to evaluate your research? Which datasets will you use? Are you using any established benchmark? Have you reached any result so far? - Conclusions and reflections: What is the current status of your research? What are the main challenges you are facing? Why do you think your research will be successful? Submissions must be no longer than 4 pages and must adhere to the two column ACM conference proceeding style. Templates and examples in LaTeX and various versions of Microsoft Word are available for download from the ACM Master Article Template web pages at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Papers must be in PDF (Adobe’s Portable Document Format) format and must be submitted electronically. Submissions must be single-author, on the topic of the doctoral work. The name of the supervisor must be clearly marked (“supervised by …”) on the paper, under the author’s name. Submission Submit your paper via EasyChair at the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=debs2021 (select "DEBS 2021 Doctoral Symposium Track"). If you have any questions, please contact the Doctoral Symposium co-chairs, Daniele Dell’Aglio and David Eyers.