*** First Call for Doctoral Consortium Papers ***

37th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering

(ISSRE 2026)

October 20-23, 2026, 5* St. Raphael Resort and Marina

Limassol, Cyprus

https://cyprusconferences.org/issre2026/

The ISSRE 2026 Doctoral Symposium is intended to bring together PhD students working

on innovative research for improving, monitoring, and assessing the reliability,

dependability, and security of software systems, and give them the opportunity to present

and discuss their research in a constructive, friendly, and international atmosphere. The

goals of the Doctoral Symposium are:

• Providing a setting for constructive feedback on participants' current research and

guidance on future research directions;

• Developing a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;

• Providing an opportunity for PhD students to interact with established researchers and

practitioners in the software reliability engineering community.

The authors of the selected papers will present their work and receive feedback both from

a panel of experts from academia and industry and from other Doctoral Symposium

students. The students will also have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of

completing a PhD, such as how to perform research, how to design and execute empirical

research, etc.

The papers accepted and presented at the Doctoral Symposium will be published in the

supplementary conference proceedings of ISSRE 2026 and participants in the Doctoral

Symposium will be given the opportunity to present a poster about their dissertation

research at the conference.

Who should participate

Students at all stages (at the beginning, at the middle, or near the end of their PhD) who

are working on a thesis topic relevant to ISSRE are encouraged to participate in the

Doctoral Symposium.

Submissions

Each submission consists of two elements:

• Research proposal: a 4-page paper describing your dissertation research to be authored

by the student only. Your advisor should be included in the acknowledgments.

• Letter of recommendation: ask your advisor to submit a letter of recommendation in

support of your application. This letter should include your name and a candid assessment

of the current status of your dissertation research. The letter should be emailed to both

Doctoral Symposium Co-Chairs (issre2026-ds AT stefan-winter.net) with the subject

"ISSRE 2026 Doctoral Symposium Recommendation".

Your research proposal should contain at least the following items: 1) a title for your work;

2) an abstract (maximum 200 words); 3) a description of the technical problem to be

solved and the research questions to be answered; 4) the proposed approach; 5) a brief

description of the work accomplished to date; 6) the tentative date of your thesis defense.

All submissions must be original work, and must not have been previously published, nor

be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Formatting guidelines

Papers must be written in English, and be formatted according to the IEEE Computer

Society Format Guidelines (https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates).

Submissions must comply with IEEE’s author guidelines for AI-generated texts

(https://open.ieee.org/author-guidelines-for-artificial-intelligence-ai-generated-text/).

Process

All papers must be submitted electronically at the following link:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=issre2026 .

Please make sure to select the track on  Doctoral Symposium at the beginning of the

submission process.

Submissions will be reviewed by the Doctoral Symposium co-chairs. Authors of

submissions selected for acceptance will present their work during the Doctoral

Symposium and have the camera-ready version of their paper published in the ISSRE 2026

Supplementary Proceedings and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. In addition, authors of

accepted submissions will be given the opportunity to present a poster about their

dissertation research at the conference.

Important Dates (AoE)

• Submission deadline: July 22, 2026

• Notification of acceptance: July 29, 2026

• Camera-ready copy submission: July 29, 2026

• Author registration deadline: August 19, 2026

Organisation

General Chairs

• Leonardo Mariani, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy

• George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Program Coordinator

• Roberto Natella, GSSI, Italy

Research Program Committee Chairs

• Domenico Cotroneo, UNC Charlotte, USA

• Jie M. Zhang, King's College London, UK

Industry Program Chairs

• Jinyang Liu, Bytedance, USA

• Sigrid Eldh, Ericsson AB, Sweden

Workshop Chairs

• Georgia Kapitsaki, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

• August Shi, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Doctoral Symposium Chairs

• Stefan Winter, LMU Munich, Germany

• Lili Wei, McGill University, Canada

Fast Abstract Chairs

• Luigi Lavazza, University of Insubria, Italy

• Yintong Huo, SMU, Singapore

JIC2 Chair

• Helene Waeselynck, LAAS-CNRS, France

Publicity Chairs

• Allison K. Sulivan, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA

• Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Publication Chairs

• Sherlock Licorish, Otago Business School, New Zealand

• Maria Teresa Rossi, GSSI, Italy

Artifact Evaluation Chairs

• Naghmeh Ivaki, University of Coimbra, Portugal

• Fumio Machida, University of Tsukuba, Japan

Diversity and Inclusion Chair

• Eleni Constantinou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Financial Chair

• Costas Pattichis, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Web Chairs

• Michalis Ioannides, Easy Conferences LTD

• Elena Masserini, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy

Registration Chair

• Easy Conferences LTD