NIER provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking research in software engineering to accelerate the exposure of the community to early yet promising and potentially inspiring research efforts.

To support this goal, NIER 2017 will publish two kinds of papers:

1. Reflections (on the past) such as:
1. Startling results that call into question current research directions;
2. Bold arguments on current research directions that may be somehow misguided;
3. Results that disregard established results or beliefs of evidence that call for fundamentally new directions.
2. Visions (of the future):
1. Bold visions of new directions which may not yet be supported by solid results but rather by a strong and well motivated scientific intuition. An example of such a vision can be unusual synergies with other disciplines, or the importance of software engineering in problems whose software engineering aspects have not been studied earlier.

The writing style can even be narrative to the extent where this supports the motivation for an emerging research direction.

Note that evaluation results are not required for NIER papers, but preliminary results providing initial support for the proposed ideas claimed are welcome.

The track addresses the same topics of interest as those of the technical research paper track. However, NIER authors are encouraged to combine these topics in new ways, to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software engineering, as well as to argue for the importance of software engineering research in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of scope

NIER papers are not second-class ICSE research track papers. NIER is a forum for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated research directions and emerging results. Therefore, a NIER submission should not be an ICSE research submission with no or less evaluation, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results. For such out-of-scope submissions, authors should consider submitting to the main ICSE conference, one of the many ICSE workshops, or one of the satellite ICSE conferences.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria.

• Value: the problem is worth exploring;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice;
• Originality: of the paper's insight;
• Synergy: the paper appropriately connects a set of concepts that were previously treated separately;
• Validity: soundness of the rationale;
• Scholarship: appropriate consideration of relevant literature;
• Quality: overall paper quality; and
• Surprise: startling and unexpected findings.

How to submit (please read the “double-blind submission guideline” below)

You must specify one and only one of the most related pieces of work (in your opinion) in the first sentence of the related work section, and articulate how your work is novel and how its results are emerging. We understand that this selection is subjective and often an idea is related to many research papers. The goal of identifying the most related work is to help add an anchor point for articulating the novelty.

A NIER submission must conform at the time of submission to the ICSE 2017 submission and formatting instructions, and must not exceed four pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. NIER papers must be submitted electronically at the NIER EasyChair submission site (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icse2017nier) , by the submission deadline.

Submissions that do not comply with the instructions and size limits may be rejected without review.

At least one author of each paper is required to register for the ICSE 2017 conference and present their paper.

Note that authors of accepted papers are also highly encouraged to submit a poster describing their work. Posters will allow authors and interested participants to connect to each other and to engage in discussions about the work presented.

Double-blind submission guideline

ICSE 2017 NIER will conduct double-blind reviewing, the very first time at ICSE NIER. ICSE 2017 NIER submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. Authors should leave out author names and affiliations from the body of their submission. They should also ensure that any citations to related work by themselves is written in third person, that is, “the prior work of XYZ” as opposed to “our prior work”. Authors having further questions on double blind reviewing are encouraged to contact the Program Co-Chairs by email.

Important Dates

• Submissions Due: October 26th, 2016
• Notification of Acceptance: January 23rd, 2017
• Camera Ready Copy: February 13th, 2017

Organization

Co-Chairs:

Cristian Cadar, Imperial College London
Lin Tan, University of Waterloo

Committee:

Earl Barr, University College London
Ivan Beschastnikh, University of British Columbia
Antonio Carzaniga, USI - Università della Svizzera italiana
T. Y. Chen, Swinburne University of Technology
Serge Demeyer, Universiteit Antwerpen (ANSYMO)
Alastair Donaldson, Imperial College London
Gordon Fraser, University of Sheffield
Vijay Ganesh, University of Waterloo
Carlo Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano
Milos Gligoric, University of Texas at Austin
Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, École Polytechnique de Montréal
Mark Harman, University College London
Rob Hierons, Brunel University
Daniel Jackson, MIT
Sarfraz Khurshid, The University of Texas at Austin
Shuvendu Lahiri, Microsoft Research
Thomas Latoza, George Mason University
Julia Lawall, INRIA-Regal
Peng Liu, IBM Watson Research Center
Benjamin Livshits, Microsoft Research
Shan Lu, University of Chicago
Darko Marinov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Corina Pasareanu, CMU/NASA Ames Research Center
John Penix, Google Inc
Baishakhi Ray, University of Virginia
John Regehr, University of Utah
Neha Rungta, NASA Ames Research Center in California
Zhendong Su, University of California, Davis
Tetsuo Tamai, Hosei University
Andre Van Der Hoek, University of California, Irvine
Xin Xia, Zhejiang University
Yingfei Xiong, Peking University
Annie T.T. Ying, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Xiangyu Zhang, Purdue University
Minghui Zhou, Peking University
Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research