The IEEE International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS) has become an established venue for the publication of research in the field of information science. The eleventh edition of the conference series (RCIS 2017) will be held in Brighton, UK on May 10-12, 2017.

The RCIS 2017 Doctoral Consortium is organized as an opportunity for doctoral students to present, discuss and develop their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers. The doctoral consortium is especially useful for those students that have defined a topic, a research plan, have obtained some results, and have stillroom for revising their plan. However, we encourage doctoral students at all stages to participate, for an objective of the doctoral consortium is also to help establish a community of junior researchers in the field of information science.

As part of the RCIS 2017 conference, the scope and topics of the doctoral consortium are the same as those of the main conference.

The Doctoral Consortium has the following objectives:

• Provide a setting for PhD-students to present their work and meet other students in the community
• Provide feedback on PhD-students' current research and guidance on future research directions
• Offer each PhD-student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from researchers and students outside their own institution
• Promote the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research
• Contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events

The DC is organized in sessions embedded in the main RCIS 2017 conference program.

Students that are interested in obtaining feedback on their research are invited to submit papers (maximum length: 6 pages) that have to address the following points:

• Introduce the field of research and identify the main challenges
• Formulate the research questions and objectives, justifying why they were chosen
• Outline the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions
• Sketch the research methodology that is being applied
• Describe the proposed solution and the results achieved so far
• State how the suggested solution is different or better than existing approaches
• Indicate the issues still to be resolved, and describe the next steps that are planned

Submissions must be written in English, are authored by the student only, and must follow the IEEE 2-column format available at http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Submissions must be unpublished and must not be under review for any other conference, workshop or journal.

The submission website is: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcis2017. Please choose “Doctoral Consortium” as a submission type. Authors of accepted submissions will submit their camera-ready version using the same format as the initial submission. The reviewers’ comments shall be taken into account in the camera-ready paper. Authors will receive information on the presentation, and how to register for the conference. There will be a discounted registration fee for PhD students.

Accepted Doctoral Consortium papers will be included in the RCIS 2017 Conference Proceedings and will be published with the IEEE Conference Publications Program through IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Papers should be submitted in IEEE Xplore compliant PDF format. Please use the IEEE PDF eXpress tool (http://www.pdf-express.org/) to convert your source file into an IEEE Xplore compliant PDF file or to check if your own PDF file is IEEE Xplore compliant. The conference ID for the IEEE PDF eXpress tool will be provided soon on the RCIS 2017 web site. Please note that submitting a file to IEEE PDF eXpress is only used for the creation of a PDF document and does not constitute submission to the RCIS 2017 conference; you must still submit your paper through the online submission site mentioned above. The RCIS 2017 Doctoral Consortium Program Committee will review all papers submissions for the Doctoral Consortium.

By submitting a paper, the doctoral student agrees that in case of acceptance he/she will register to the RCIS 2017 conference and present the paper. Only papers that have been presented by their authors will be published in the Conference Proceedings.