*** 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-gener...). 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