ISWC Mentoring Lunch

The Mentoring Lunch at the International Semantic Web Conference brings together graduate students and early-career researchers with experienced researchers from both, industry and academia for a lively discussion and question-answering session on a variety of topics. If you are a PhD student, a postdoc, or have just started an independent research career and would like to get advice on any of the round-table topics listed below, please join us at the specially designated tables during a lunch break on October 24th, 2017.

The mentors are all volunteers from the speakers, chairs, and other senior participants at the conference.

If you would like to get advice from mentors, please sign up for lunch using the form below and answer a few quick questions that would help us with the organisation of the lunch. We might be limited by the room capacity and by the number of mentors, so the first people to sign up will be automatically added to the list of attendees, the rest will be put on the waiting list (concrete capacity will be announced soon). The last date to register is September 22nd, 2017.

While we are organising only the mentoring lunch, we expect that some of you might want to have a more sustained relationship with the mentors and we invite you to ask the mentors at lunch about such a possibility.

Topics

Graduate Students

  • Is grad school right for you?
  • How to pick the right research area?
  • Publishing. How important is it for your PhD? When is your story ready to be published? Which journals and conferences to try? Who should be involved in writing the paper, and who should be co-authors?
  • How to handle problems with your advisor or colleagues.

Early Career researchers

  • After your Ph.D. – what comes next? Choice between postdoc, faculty position, jobs outside academia.
  • Starting your own lab: where and how (tenured/fellowship/grant) and other issues.
  • Preparing for tenure/promotion.
  • Raising kids while pursuing an academic career.
  • Publishing. How important is it for your career? When is your story ready to be published? Which journals and conferences to try? Who should be involved in writing the paper, and who should be coauthors?

If you have questions and suggestions, please feel free to send email to iswc.mentoring.lunch@gmail.com.

Mentors

  • Harith Alani, The Open University, UK
  • Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Axel Ngonga, Universität Leipzig, Germany
  • Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
  • Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool, UK
  • Ian Horrocks, University of Oxford, UK
  • Natasha Noy, Google, US

Organisers