Message from the Program Co-chairs

This is the first ever symposium dedicated to search based software engineering. We are particularly grateful for the widespread participation and support from the SBSE community. 26 papers were submitted to the research and PhD tracks, with authors from institutions in 14 countries: the community is truly international. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted such high quality manuscripts. We wanted to ensure a thorough and constructive review process for the symposium. All submitted papers were reviewed by at least three experts in the field: in total, 89 reviews were performed. Authors were given the opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings and this enabled reviewers to refine their review comments. After extensive discussion, 9 manuscripts were accepted as full papers, 5 as short papers, and 3 were accepted to the PhD track. Providing detailed and constructive comments is a difficult task but a vitally important one if we, as a community, wish to encourage the publication of high quality, rigorous and relevant research. We would therefore like to express our gratitude to the members of the program committee for taking the time to do so. We have designed the symposium program with the exchange of ideas in mind. In technical sessions, authors are encouraged to give concise presentations covering the novel ideas and key results that will be of particular interest to the audience. The presentations will be followed by a general discussion on the session topic, and we invite all attendees to actively participate in these discussions. We are providing facilities for ad-hoc presentations during the discussion, and will capture the points raised and distribute them to the attendees after the symposium.