The Doctoral Consortium will take place in conjunction with the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, (BIOSTEC), to be held February 11 - 13 in Vienna, Austria. The BIOSTEC 2021 doctoral consortium will provide an opportunity for graduate students to explore their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished experts in the field.

The Doctoral Consortium on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies is intended to bring together Ph.D. students within the biomedical field to discuss their research in an international forum. More precisely, the Doctoral Consortium will provide students with an opportunity to: • Present their own ongoing PhD research work in a relaxed and supportive environment; • Receive feedback and suggestions from peers and experienced faculty members; • Gain an overview of the breadth and depth of biomedical engineering systems and technologies; • Obtain insight into directions for biomedical engineering research taken by other doctoral candidates; • Discuss concerns about research, supervision, the job market, and other issues; • Network with peers and future colleagues Thus, the symposium will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at biomedical engineering, will promote scholarship and networking among new researchers in this interdisciplinary area, and will expose these promising young researchers to the larger global community.

	Federico Cabitza Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca and IRCCS Ospedale Galeazzi Italy e-mail
Brief Bio Federico Cabitza, MEng, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy) where he teaches Human-Computer Interaction and where he coordinates the research activities of the MUDI Lab (Modelling Uncertainty, Decisions and Interaction). Since 2016 he has also had a research appointment with the IRCCS Orthopaedics Institute Galeazzi in Milano (Italy) and more recently with San Raffaele Hospital. His current research interests regard the design and evaluation of interactive systems and decision support based on machine learning techniques in the Healthcare domain.

	Silvana Quaglini Dept. of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Pavia Italy e-mail
Brief Bio Silvana Quaglini is Full Professor of Health Care Information Systems Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy, where she teaches Medical Informatics and Decision Support in Medicine. Se is author of more than 200 articles in International Journals and Scientific Books. Her research interests regard decision support systems in medicine and more particularly basic areas such as decision theory, clinical process modeling, artificial intelligence, probabilistic systems, biomedical statistics, knowledge acquisition. Application areas include support systems for diagnosis, therapy and monitoring, such as computerized guidelines, economic evaluation models based on decision analysis, telemedicine systems and workflow management within healthcare organizations. The main medical areas covered by such applications are stroke, chronic diseases, cardiovascular risk, motor and cognitive rehabilitation. The recent push toward personalized medicine has focused the latest applications on the "shared decision making" and "context-aware home-monitoring patients

ADVISORY BOARD

The Doctoral Consortium advisory board will comment each presentation and at the end of the consortium there will be a general discussion, including a reflection about current and future research topics in the area.

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM REQUIREMENTS AND RULES

The Doctoral Consortium is based on the following requirements and rules:

• It is open only to Doctoral Students who have started their research;
• Each paper must have a single author, i.e. a PhD student. Other contributors, including supervisors, could be acknowledged in the “Acknowledgements” section of the paper.
• Each student with an accepted paper at the Doctoral Consortium must register and attend HEALTHINF: a special student fee applies;
• Each paper must be presented by the student
• Submissions will be judged mainly on relevance, originality, technical quality and clarity;
• Paper length: 8,000 to 50,000 characters (excluding white spaces);
• Papers must be written in MS-Word or Latex including the following information:
• research problem;
• outline of objectives;
• state of the art;
• methodology and
• expected outcome;
• stage of the research.

Registered Doctoral Consortium papers will not be included in the book of proceedings as archival publications or in the Digital Library and therefore will remain free of copyright.

HOW TO APPLY TO THE DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM

To apply for participation at the Doctoral Consortium, please submit your paper through the online submission platform PRIMORIS and follow the instructions and templates (MSWord and LaTex ) that can be found under Templates. After the paper submission has been successfully completed, authors will receive an automatic confirmation e-mail.

ACCEPTED STUDENTS SHOULD PREPARE:

1. An introduction of themselves and their Ph.D. project for the introductory session. 1 slide only. Duration: 60 sec max.
2. A 10 minute presentation of their Ph.D. project to be used for introducing discussion about their project and its main issues during the small group sessions.
3. Students are also invited to prepare a poster about their Ph.D. for the main conference poster session.

BEST PhD PROJECT AWARD

A "Best PhD Project Award" will be conferred to the student of a paper presented at the conference doctoral consortium, selected by the Doctoral Chair based on the combination of paper reviewing marks and the feedback of the Advisory Board. The award will be announced and bestowed at the conference closing session. The author of an awarded paper will be entitled to:

• A signed and stamped official award certificate;
• The announcement of their achievement on a special conference webpage;
• A one year free membership of INSTICC (http://www.insticc.org), warranting full access to the SCITEPRESS Digital Library. If already an INSTICC member, then this offer adds one year to her/his current membership.
• A voucher for a free or reduced registration* in one event sponsored by INSTICC, valid during a 12 months period, including all conference materials (without the printed proceedings). This voucher is only available if the presenter attends the closing session and receives the award.

* Speakers are entitled to a 50% discount over the basic registration fee; non-speakers are entitled to a free registration.

Important Deadlines