Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance News

CALL FOR PAPERS

The annual ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware conference is a premier forum for the discussion of innovations and recent advances in the design, implementation, experimentation, deployment, and usage of middleware systems. Middleware is the software that resides between applications and the underlying architecture. The goal of middleware is to facilitate the development of applications by providing higher-level abstractions for better programmability, performance, scalability, security, and a variety of essential features. It is a rapidly evolving and growing field.

Following the success of past conferences in this series, the 13th International Middleware Conference will be the premier event for middleware research, technology and experimentation in 2012. The scope of the conference is the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of system platforms and architectures for current and future computing, storage, and communication environments. Highlights of the conference will include a high quality technical program, invited speakers, an industrial track, poster and demo presentations, a doctoral symposium, and workshops.

Original submissions of research papers on a diversity of topics are sought, particularly those identifying new research directions. The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to:

• MIDDLEWARE PLATFORMS:
  • Middleware for emerging cloud computing, datacenters, and server farms
  • Middleware for traditional clusters and grid computing
  • Middleware for mobile devices, ubiquitous, and mobile computing
  • Middleware for sensor networks and embedded systems
  • Middleware for Internet applications and social networks
  • Middleware for Web services, Web service composition, and SOA
  • Middleware for data-intensive computing
  • Event-based, publish/subscribe, and message-oriented middleware
  • Middleware support for multimedia and tele-immersion
  • Reconfigurable, adaptable, and reflective middleware approaches
  • Middleware solutions for distributed databases
  • Peer-to-peer middleware solutions
  • Middleware for social computing, social software, and crowdsourcing
• SYSTEMS ISSUES FOR MIDDLEWARE:
  • Reliability and fault-tolerance
  • Scalability and performance
  • Energy- and power-aware techniques
  • Virtualization, auto-scaling, provisioning, and scheduling
  • Security, Privacy, and Information assurance
  • Storage and file systems
  • Parallelized execution and techniques
  • Dynamic configuration and self- or autonomic- management of middleware
  • Real-time solutions and quality of service
  • Case studies on the evaluation and deployment of middleware: challenges, techniques, and lessons learned
• DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND TOOLS:
  • Programming frameworks, parallel programming, and design methodologies for middleware
  • Empirical and deployment studies for middleware solutions
  • Debugging, diagnosis and distributed debugging of middleware
  • Probabilistic techniques and approaches for middleware
  • Methodologies and tools for middleware design, implementation, verification, and evaluation
  • Formal methods, verification, and software engineering for middleware
  • Security and privacy
• OLD WINE

  Revisiting classical middleware paradigms, e.g., object models, aspect orientation, etc.

• INDUSTRY PAPERS

  The conference strongly encourages submission of industry-focused papers and use case studies; full papers should be submitted to the main program, where they will be reviewed using appropriate criteria (e.g., emphasizing experience and system evolution), and accepted papers will be published in the main conference proceedings. Additionally, short industry-focused papers (6 pages, ACM style) may be submitted to a special industrial track whose Call for Papers will be issued separately, later. Accepted short papers will be presented at the conference and published in the ACM Digital Library.

• BIG-IDEAS PAPERS

  We particularly encourage “big ideas papers”; that is papers that have the potential for opening up new research directions. For such papers, the potential to motivate new research is more important than full experimental evaluation, though some preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of the approach or idea is important. Authors should indicate in the introduction that their paper is a vision of a big idea, rather than more mature work. Such papers should clearly indicate why the idea is revolutionary and not evolutionary; what the major questions still to be answered are; and possible avenues of attack for the community to pursue towards the development of the idea.

• EXPERIMENTATION AND DEPLOYMENT PAPERS

  We also particularly encourage the submission of papers describing complete systems, platforms, and comprehensive experimental evaluations of alternative designs and solutions to well-known problems. The emphasis during the evaluation of these papers will be less on the novelty and more on the demonstrated usefulness and potential impact of the contributions, the extensive experimentation involved, the comprehensiveness of the approach, and the quality and weight of the lessons learned (including negative results).

• OPEN AVAILABILITY OF DATASETS AND CODE

  Middleware 2012 authors are encouraged to make their system/library implementations and data sets publicly available for the community’s wide benefit as open-source software and their experimental data available as open datasets. The conference web site will provide storage space in which this information will be made available to the Middleware research community. This is particularly encouraged for “experimentation and deployment papers”.

ORGANIZATION:

General Chair:

Bettina Kemme, McGill University, Canada

Program Committee Chairs:

Priya Narasimhan, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Peter Triantafillou, University of Patras, Greece

Industry Chairs

Michael Spreitzer, IBM, USA
Jan de Meer, SmartSpaceLab, Germany

Workshop Chair

Marta Patino-Martinez, Technical University, Madrid, Spain

Demo and Poster Chair

Eric Wohlstadter, UBC, Canada

Sponsorship Chair

Fred Douglis, EMC Backup Recovery Systems, USA

Local Arrangements Chair

Wenbo He, McGill University, Canada

Web Chair

Muthucumaru Maheswaran, McGill University, Canada

Proceedings Chair

Kevin Huguenin, EPFL, Switzerland