[ecoop-info] CFP: 14th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM 2015)

[Thomas Ledoux]

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 14th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM 2015)
http://arm2015.isis.vanderbilt.edu

Collocated with ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2015, Vancouver, Canada (Dec 
7-11)
http://2015.middleware-conference.org/

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Important Dates
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- Abstract submission, Aug 20th, 2015
- Paper submission, Aug 27th, 2015
- Notification, Sept 27th, 2015
- Camera Ready, Oct 3rd, 2015

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History
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Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM) is the main forum for 
researchers on adaptive and reflective middleware platforms and systems. 
It was the first ever workshop to be held with the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 
International Middleware Conference, dating back to the year 2000, in 
Palisades, NY (Middleware 2000) and has been running every year since.

Scope
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Currently available middleware systems are required to support various 
levels of flexibility in order to adapt and tailor their behavior and 
properties to the increasing dynamism of new models of computation and 
new classes of applications. These usually include:

* Networked applications that must operate under resource constraints 
and intermittent network connections;
* Cyber-physical systems with a tight integration among computation, 
physical devices and interaction with the physical world;
* Open systems with long operation lives that are able to accept new 
components, remove existing components, and adapt to new situations;
* Next generation networked interactive applications driven by the 
availability of devices such as smartphones and tablets;
* New degrees of high performance computing, such as the goal of 
exa-scale computing systems;
* On-demand assembled applications to meet specific needs, from various 
and heterogeneous components, requiring infrastructure support to enable 
the assembling of trusted (reliable, secure, ... ) systems given 
high-level policies with goals and constraints;
* Increasing trend towards smart cities, smart grids, ... that involve 
the Internet of Things paradigm and Big Data.

Applying reflective techniques to middleware, and related software 
platforms for interoperability, one-to-many deployment, and 
adaptability, in order to "open up" their implementation, was explored 
in the previous workshops in this series and proved particularly 
successful and influential. Reflection by itself is today considered a 
baseline, yet it is insufficient to deliver the flexibility demanded by 
today’s ever diversifying middleware environments, requiring higher and 
higher degrees of adaptability and resilience. The 14th Workshop on 
Adaptive and Reflective Middleware aims to follow on the success of 
previous editions by providing researchers with a forum to address this 
technological gap and explore how reflective approaches can be combined 
with complementary perspectives to support the complete life-cycle of 
highly adaptive middleware platforms. As in the previous editions, the 
traditional scope of the workshop will be expanded to the following topics:

* Broader range of techniques that expand current work on software 
componentization and design patterns in support of adaptation, examples 
being: software architecture; design patterns; aspect orientation; 
models at runtime; control theory; machine learning;
* Current strong trends towards decentralized and diverse environments, 
including: Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, 
peer-to-peer platforms; network-centric systems; grid computing; sensor 
networks, pervasive and mobile applications, possibly backed up by 
cloud-like infrastructures. In essence, this implies considering 
domain-specific adaptation approaches (e.g., generalized fault-tolerance 
in peer-to-peer platforms differs from tighter cloud data center 
architecture);
* How the development of adaptive, flexible and interoperable middleware 
for heterogeneous execution environments requires practitioners to adopt 
a multi-level perspective by extending one’s focus beyond "pure" 
middleware, and encompassing the remaining system "layers" (e.g., 
sensors, devices, OSs, virtualization technology, networks, 
applications). Reflection and adaptability may encompass the entire 
execution stack;
* The connections with other techniques and research fields that are 
related to dynamic adaptation, such as autonomic computing, self-* 
systems, context-aware computing, reactive programming, and 
location-based services.

Suggested Topics
-------------------------

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Design and performance of adaptive and/or reflective middleware platforms;
* Experiences with adaptive and reflective technologies in specific 
domains (e.g., sensor networks, ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile 
computing, cloud/grid computing, P2P, Systems-of-Systems, IoT, CPS, etc.);
* Cross-layer interactions and adaptation mechanisms including network, 
OS, VM & device level techniques;
* Adaptation and reflection in heterogeneous execution paradigms (e.g., 
P2P networks, network-centric computing, pub/sub, stream processing);
* Application of adaptive and reflective middleware techniques to 
achieve: reconfigurability and/or adaptability and/or separation of 
concerns; reuse and reification of adaptation techniques and strategies;
* Incorporating non-functional properties into middleware: real-time, 
fault-tolerance, security, trust, privacy, ...;
* Fundamental developments in the theory and practice of reflection, 
adaptation and control, as it relates to middleware and its interaction 
with other layers;
* Techniques to improve performance and/or scalability of adaptive and 
reflective techniques;
* Evaluation methodologies for adaptive and reflective middleware; 
guidelines, testbeds and benchmarks;
* Approaches to maintain the integrity of adaptive and reflective 
technologies; convergence of adaptation;
* Tool support for adaptive and reflective middleware;
* Design and programming abstractions to manage the complexity of 
adaptive and reflective mechanisms;
* Software engineering methodologies for the design and development of 
adaptive middleware;
* Methods for reasoning and storing knowledge about services provided by 
adaptive/reflective middleware;
* The role of techniques such as learning in the design of long-lived 
adaptive middleware;
* Methods for asynchronous, distributed control, 
coordination/cooperation among components providing middleware services;
* Metrics on properties such as cost-of-adaptation, 
quality-of-adaptation, consistency-of-adaptation.

Submission Information
--------------------------------

ARM 2015 invites paper submissions in the following three categories:

* Research papers: Research papers should not exceed 6 pages of text on 
US letter size paper in ACM format. Content should be work that is not 
previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere;
* Poster papers: Poster submissions should initially submit a 2-page 
abstract describing the poster content in ACM format; this offers the 
opportunity to present and receive feedback at the workshop about work 
still in its early stages;
* Demo papers: Demo submissions should initially submit a 2-page 
abstract in ACM format, describing the contribution and content of the 
demo; we are particularly interested in demonstrations of adaptive 
middleware tools and solutions.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the 
proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may 
be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The 
official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings 
related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings 
are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, 
the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)

ACM style file can be found at 
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates/

Paper submissions will use EasyChair 
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=arm2015)


Organization
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Workshop Chairs:
- Aniruddha Gokhale, Vanderbilt University, USA
- Nikolaos Georgantas, Inria, France

Program Committee:
Currently being defined

Steering Committee:
- Gordon Blair, Lancaster University, UK
- Renato Cerqueira, PUC-Rio, Brazil
- Fabio M. Costa, Federal University of Goias, Brazil
- Paulo Ferreira, INESC-ID, Portugal
- Fabio Kon, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Nalini Venkatasubramanian, University of California, Irvine, USA