Sami Yangui

ACM Distinguished Speaker Program

Speaker: Professor Athman Bouguettaya, University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia)

Title: Writing for Top Journals Workshop

Location: LAAS-CNRS - 7 Av. du Colonel Roche, 31400 Toulouse (Room Europe)

Date and Time: Thursday September 11, 2025 - 10 a.m to 4 p.m

Registration form (free): https://forms.gle/UCYYMeGhK5F4YPSP6

Abstract:

This workshop aims to train early career researchers and PhD students to write for top journals and convert conference papers into successful quality journal articles. Writing for journals requires skills that not only include sharpened research ability but also understanding the way journals work and operate. This workshop will go through the whole spectrum of manuscript preparation, journal selection, and submission, response to reviewers, decision aftermath, and ethical matters. This training will equip researchers with skills that would enable them to confidently submit and publish papers in top ranked journals. Conducting quality research is only the beginning of the process.

Publishing in top journals is the ultimate aim. Several university world-ranking schemes use journal publications as a main criterion for ranking universities and academic departments. Therefore, it is imperative that researchers learn the right writing strategy that would maximize their chances of getting their paper accepted in top journals.

Format of the Workshop:

• Essentials of technical writing and publication
  • Why should we publish?
  • How to start?
• Structure of a good paper
• Important aspects of journal paper writing: A deeper dive (1 st part)
• Break
• Important aspects of journal paper writing: A deeper dive (2 nd part)
• Dissection of abstract and conclusion
  • Exercise 1 – Writing an Abstract
  • Exercise 2 – Writing a Conclusion
• Examples of Good and bad papers
• Submission and Review
  • What to watch out for
  • Interacting with editors and responding to reviewers
  • Reviewing for journals
• Other aspects of journal publication
  • Ethics, authorship, citations and impact factors
• Closing remarks

Short Biography of the Speaker

Athman Bouguettaya is Professor and previous Head of School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was also previously Professor and Head of School of Computer Science and IT at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) in 1992. He was previously Science Leader in Service Computing at the CSIRO ICT Centre (now DATA61), Canberra. Australia. Before that, he was a tenured faculty member and Program director in the Computer Science department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (commonly known as Virginia Tech) (USA). He is or has been on the editorial boards of several journals including, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, The ACM Computing Surveys, the International Journal on Next Generation Computing, VLDB Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer-Verlag book series on Services Science. He served as a guest editor of a number of special issues including the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology on Semantic Web services, a special issue the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing on Service Query Models, and a special issue of IEEE Internet Computing on Database Technology on the Web. He was the General Chair of the WISE International Conference for 2023. He was the General Chair of the IEEE ICWS for 2021 and 2022. He was also General Chair of ICSOC for 2020. He served as a Program Chair of the 2012 and 2017 International Conference on Web and Information System Engineering, the 2009 and 2010 Australasian Database Conference, 2008 International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) and the IEEE RIDE Workshop on Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government (RIDE-WS-ECEG'04). He also served on the IEEE Fellow Selection Committee as a Vice-Chair for 2022 and 2023. He has published more than 330 books, book chapters, and articles in journals and conferences in the area of databases and service computing (e.g., the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the ACM Transactions on the Web, ACM Computing Surveys, WWW Journal, VLDB Journal, SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, and EDBT). Bouguettaya's work in Web services and more generally in service computing greatly contributed to the formation of a whole community around the idea of service computing. The impact of his foundational work in Web services has led to numerous highly cited papers. He is listed as 0.5% top scholar in the world by the ScholarGPS World Ranking in Computer Science. He is also listed as Top 2% Scientist in Computer Science by Stanford University Study. He is also listed by Google Scholar as one of the top 10 cited researcher in the world using the keyword "Service Computing" or “Service-Oriented Computing” or “Web Services”. He was the recipient of several federally competitive grants in Australia (e.g., ARC), the US (e.g., NSF, NIH), Qatar (NPRP). EU (FP7), and China (NSFC). He also won major industry grants from companies like HP and Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). He has been an invited speaker at many international conferences and universities around the world. Because of his pioneering work, he was invited to a keynote and speaker at a number of conferences and universities in Australia, UK, France, China, India, Morocco, Malaysia, Netherlands, Tunisia, New Zealand, Algeria, Qatar, the UAE, etc. Bouguettaya has trained many PhD students who went on to be professors at Purdue University (USA), University of Michigan, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, Curtin University, and Texas A&M. He also trained a number of postdocs who are now researchers at Alibaba, Sun Yat-Sen University (China), University of Adelaide, Data61, and UNSW. Bouguettaya is a Fellow of the IEEE, Member of the Academia Europaea (Honoris Causa) (MAE) (HON), WISE Fellow, AAIA Fellow, and Distinguished Scientist of the ACM. He is also a Distinguished Speaker of the ACM and IEEE.