[hpc-announce] Deadline Extension: MECC at Middleware 2016

[Hervé Paulino]

We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this notice.

1st Workshop on Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets (MECC 2016) 

held in conjunction with ACM/IFIP/USENIX ACM International Middleware Conference 
Trento, Italy, 12-16 December, 2016 

IMPORTANT DATES (GMT/UTC-12) 

August 27, 2016 - Abstract submission
September 3, 2016 - Paper submission
September 27, 2016 - Notification of Acceptance
October 15, 2016 - Final version


The Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets (MECC) workshop aims to
address the ever-increasing need for a closer integration between the
different tiers on modern cloud computing platforms. 

The increasing demand for more interactive and demanding services is
limited in scenarios where connectivity is limited or
absent. Harvesting the resources present in mobile devices is a viable
solution to this problem. Now, there is an increasing demand for
middleware systems and frameworks that offer higher level abstractions
without hampering expressiveness and performance. The assumptions
normally associated with distributed systems, where nodes use fast
wired interconnects within a datacenter, no longer hold. In
particular, edge clouds use unreliable wireless links that directly
translates into unavailability and subsequently resulting in
churn. Simultaneously, since mobile devices are energy limited,
heavyweight distributed algorithms, such as coordination using a
leader-based consensus protocol, are unpractical.

As an effort to offload computation from mobile devices, cloudlets
were originally envisioned as server like hardware at each
neighborhood, office building or more generally besides any highly
dense scenario or event. It now is transitioning to a more lightweight
approach where the offloading is done through multiple techniques
besides the use of virtual machines, as original proposed, and where
cloudlets can also offer connectivity support to crowdsourced mobile
devices, i.e., edge clouds.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to: 

- Design and performance of middleware platforms for edge clouds and cloudlets
- Mechanisms for the integration of edge clouds with cloudlets
- Security mechanisms  for edge clouds including, including but not limited to, storage and computation
- Context-aware services by cloudlets
- Connectivity-as-a-service for edge clouds provided by cloudlets
- Novel theoretical approaches for churn tolerance
- Lightweight replication and fault-tolerance algorithms
- Lightweight computation sandboxing for edge clouds
- Novel storage systems for edge clouds, with special focus on geo-aware storage engines
- Tools for testing and benchmarking MECC
- Experimental deployments and applications
- Networking coding approaches for MECC
- Programming languages for edge clouds
- P2P overlays and systems for edge clouds
- Gossip based protocols for edge clouds
- Computational frameworks for MECC
- Programming models and abstractions to manage inter-cloud interactions
- Distributed coordination and cooperation for edge clouds
- Middleware platforms for cloud-of-clouds
- Privacy enforcing algorithms for leveraging MECC
- Trust for edge clouds and/or cloudlets
- Interoperability between mobile OSes
- Formal methods for middleware verification
- Sensor fusion for MECC
- Infrastructure cloud based services for supporting MECC

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS 

Rolando Martins (University of Porto, Portugal)
Hervé Paulino (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)

Contact: mecc2016 at easychair.org

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 

Fernando Silva (University of Porto, Portugal)
Nuno Preguiça (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)
Paulo Ferreira (INESC-ID, Portugal)
Padmanabhan Pillai (Intel/Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Michael Kozuch (Intel/Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Luís Antunes (University of Porto, Portugal)
Wolfgang Richter (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Alysson Bessani (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Jiaqi Tan (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
João Lourenço (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)
Evangelia Kalyvianaki (City University London, UK)
Utsav Droila (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
João Leitão (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)
Luís Lopes (University of Porto, Portugal)
Kunal Mankodiya (University of Rhode island, USA)
Odorico Mendizabal (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil)
Eduardo Marques (University of Porto, Portugal)
Ketan Bhardwaj (Georgia Tech, USA)
Luís Veiga (Universidade de Lisboa - INESC-ID, Portugal)
Amir M. Rahmani (UC Irvine, USA and TU Wien, Austria)
Heverson B. Ribeiro (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
Manuel E. Correia (University of Porto, Portugal)
Rui Campos (University of Porto, Portugal)
Jon Francis (BOSCH, USA)


SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION 


MECC 2016 will receive proposals for communication in the form of
research papers of at most 6 pages including references. Content
should be work that is not previously published or concurrently
submitted elsewhere.

All submissions should be in PDF and must follow the ACM
template. Submissions must authors information, text, figures,
references and appendices (if applicable). Submissions that do not
respect the formatting requirement may be rejected without review.

Reviewing is single-blind. This means that the names and affiliations
of the authors must appear in the submitted papers. Each paper will
receive at least three reviews from members of the program committee.

Submissions should be done through EasyChair at the following URL:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mecc2016