We are excited to bring back to KDD 2018 the Networking with Experts Forum. The program consists of hourly round-table sessions with experts during the main conference days from August 19 – 23. This will be an invaluable opportunity for graduate students and early-career researchers to discuss their research progress as well as career development plan with each other and with leading researchers in Data Mining that would normally not be easily accessible to them. KDD and the experts consider this as an act of giving back to the research community to prepare the next generation of researchers for success. The forum is organized as round-table sessions including short presentations on individual research, and mentoring discussions based on interests. The participants will have an opportunity to intensively discuss with leading experts in corresponding areas.

The round-table sessions are informal discussions of work-in-progress, theoretical problems, practical issues, future directions, or career suggestions among participants and leading experts. Every expert will sit in a table and lead the discussion. Each participant will present their work, receive feedback from the experts, following by a Q&A session. Up to twelve attendees will be able to join each table.

We welcome proposal submissions from graduate students and early-career researchers at any stage.

How to Prepare Your One-Page Proposal

Proposals must be submitted online and must include the following for each presenter:

• Name, Affiliation, and Status (MS student, PhD student or early-career researcher)
• Select one general topic of interest from the following
• Classification
• Clustering
• Association Analysis
• Deep Learning
• Data Science Applications
• Title: The title should accurately reflect the research topic you are working on
• Abstract: The proposal should be no more than 50 words. It should be carefully written and proofread.
• Please indicate that whether we have your permission to distribute your proposal to other participants to facilitate the discussion

Submission Guidelines

Proposals are due at 12:00 Am ET, 5 August 2018. Proposals must be submitted to socialnetwork2018@kdd.org. Proposals will not be accepted after the deadline. All participants will be confirmed by 10 August 2018.

Registration

To participate at the Networking with Experts Forum, you must register for the forum. To register, just select the Networking with Experts Forum on the convention registration form. Registration opens in June. The process for submitting a proposal for the forum is separate from the process for registering. Registration is free with the main conference registration.

Program Chairs

Xiaoguang Wang
Alibaba inc.

Xia “Ben” Hu
Texas A&M University