Call for Doctoral Symposium Papers

Introduction

The 2nd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence with and for Learning Sciences: Past, Present, and Future Horizons (WAILS 2025) is a high-quality forum focused on achievements, challenges, solutions, and future perspectives concerned with the adoption of artificial intelligence methods and techniques in the context of learning sciences. Building on its successful inaugural edition, WAILS 2025 brings together researchers and practitioners working within academia, industry, and government, and coming from different fields such as computer science, education, cognitive science, economics, psychology, sociology, and human-computer interaction, with the goal of fostering a fruitful dialogue across disciplines. The accepted papers are going to be published by Springer into an LNCS post-workshop proceedings volume, and submitted for indexing to DBLP, Google Scholar, and Scopus.

Doctoral students are invited to apply to present their research to experienced scholars who will provide constructive feedback and advice. Students are encouraged to participate if they are at least six months from completing their dissertation and have already settled on a research area or dissertation topic. This forum will provide students with an opportunity to:

• Present and discuss their research ideas with experienced scholars.
• Develop their research interests under the guidance of distinguished experts.
• Explore career pathways available after completing the doctorate.
• Network and build collaborations within the community.

Students are asked to submit a brief proposal outlining their doctoral research, which will be evaluated by the doctoral symposium committee. Each student with an accepted submission will be assigned a mentor who will provide feedback on the student’s work. A mentoring session will take place during the conference, and each student is expected to attend.

Deadlines

• Paper submission: September 25, 2025
• Notification: October 23, 2025
• Camera-ready submission: November 6, 2025

Note: all the deadlines are at 11:59 pm Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time.

Submission

Platform

Papers must be written in English and submitted electronically in a PDF format, through the CMT submission system, by selecting the type “Doctoral Symposium Paper”. The link to the submission system will be available soon.

Format

Consult the WAILS 2025’s call for full and short research papers concerning the key topics of this call as well. Each proposal should be a single PDF document, with three required components, here detailed:

• Letter of recommendation (from your primary dissertation advisor, in any format):
  • Describe your interaction with the student and your assessment of the quality of their work. Explain how the WAILS 2025 doctoral symposium would benefit this student at this point in their doctoral program, as well as the contributions you expect the student to make to the group.
  • The doctoral symposium targets students who have a clear idea of their research plans and have started their research but have not yet executed a majority of their research. Please explain the structure of your student’s program and their expected level of progress.
  • Recall that students who are unable to obtain a letter of recommendation from their dissertation advisor (or the equivalent) should instead include a short explanation and a description of where the student is in their doctoral progress and the anticipated timeline.
• Research description (6 pages at most; references, figures, tables, proofs, appendixes, acknowledgments, and any other content count toward the page limit). Please use the Springer’s single-column manuscript format as specified in the guidelines, and ensure that your submission includes the following components:
  • Your name, advisor(s) name(s), and your affiliation.
  • Current year of study and projected completion date.
  • Context and motivation for your research.
  • Key related work that frames your research.
  • Specific research objectives, goals, or questions.
  • Research approach, methods, and rationale.
  • Results and contributions to date.
  • Expected next steps.
  • Dissertation status and long-term goals.
• Curriculum vitae (2 pages at most, in any format). Provide a concise summary of your current curriculum vitae, highlighting your research publications. Clearly distinguish between published papers and those currently under review or in press.

Please ensure that your submission is complete and conforms to the format and content guidelines above. Submissions that do not meet these requirements will be desk-rejected.

Templates

The doctoral students should submit the research description for review in the Springer single-column format. Templates are given below:

• Latex
• Overleaf
• Word

Non-anonymity

Submissions will be reviewed under a single-blind process; thus, authors are not required to anonymize their manuscripts before uploading them.

Non-dual policy

There is no dual submission policy, which is why submitted manuscripts must not be simultaneously under review nor submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for this workshop. A violation of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious infraction of scientific ethics, and appropriate measures will be implemented in response.

Ethical and human subjects considerations

Submissions are expected to include a discussion of ethical considerations, as well as the impact of the presented work and/or its intended application, where appropriate. The authors are expected to comply with ethical standards and regulatory guidelines associated with human subjects research, including research involving human participants and research using personally identifiable data. Submissions reporting on such human subjects research must include a statement identifying any regulatory review the research is subject to or explaining the lack of required review.

Camera-Ready Submission

The accepted papers (i.e., the research description component) will be published as part of the workshop proceedings in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LCNS) and must be compliant with the guidelines provided by the LCNS. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of the papers will be provided after acceptance. We strongly recommend the usage of LaTeX/Overleaf for the camera-ready papers to minimize the extent of reformatting. Users of the Word template must use either the version for Microsoft Word for Windows, Macintosh Office 2011, or Macintosh Office 2016 (other formats such as Open Office, etc., are not admitted) for the camera-ready submission to avoid incompatibility issues. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a consent-to-publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship are not allowed. Instructions for preparing the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be provided after acceptance. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be submitted via CMT.

Registration and Presentation Policy

Each accepted doctoral symposium paper must be accompanied by a full author registration, completed by the early registration deadline. Please kindly note that a single registration covers up to one paper accepted in the full or short paper track, and up to one paper accepted in the doctoral symposium track. Each accepted doctoral symposium paper must be presented in person to be included in the proceedings, published by Springer and available via the SpringerLink Digital Library. The official publication date is when the proceedings are made available online by Springer.

Program Chairs

• Anna Dipace, Pegaso Online University, Italy (anna.dipace [at] unipegaso.it)
• Silvio M. Pagliara, University of Cagliari, Italy (silviom.pagliara [at] unica.it)

Acknowledgements

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.