Mentoring Lunch

Overview

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 in the Foundry room at 12:40 on Wednesday, October 14, 2015. Our mentors are all volunteers from the speakers, chairs, and other senior participants at the conference.

If you would like to get advice from mentors on some of the topics below, please register for lunch and answer a few quick questions that would help us with the organization of the lunch. The first 65 people to sign up will be automatically added to the list of attendees, the rest will be put on the waiting list (we are limited by the room capacity and by the number of mentors).

While we are organizing 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 coauthors?
    • 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 an email to iswc.mentoring.lunch@gmail.com.

Preliminary list of mentors

  • Ian Horrocks (University of Oxford)
  • Natasha Noy (Google)
  • David Karger (MIT)
  • Maria-Esther Vidal (Universidad Simon Bolivar)
  • Rudi Studer (KIT)
  • Zhe Wu (Oracle)
  • Marcelo Arenas (PUC Chile)
  • Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
  • Peter Mika (Yahoo)
  • Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University)
  • Lora Aroyo (VU University Amsterdam)
  • Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
  • Yolanda Gill (Univeristy of Southern California)
  • Miriam Fernandez (The Open Univeristy)
  • Michel Dumontier (Stanford Univeristy)
  • Abraham Bernstein (Univeristy of Zurich)

Organizers

Matthew Horridge, Stanford University, US
Nadeschda Nikitina, University of Oxford, UK