[Storage-research-list] ACM/IFIP Middleware 2019 - Workshops Joint Call for Papers

[Vinay Setty]

Middleware 2019 - Workshops Joint Call for Papers



The annual Middleware conference is a major forum for the discussion of 
innovations and recent scientific advances of middleware systems with a 
focus on the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of 
distributed systems, platforms and architectures for computing, storage, 
and communication.



This year, the conference will feature nine high-quality affiliated 
workshops in different subject areas related to middleware technology.



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MISE 2019: 1st International Workshop on Middleware for Lightweight, 
Spontaneous Environments



Submission Deadline: September 6, 2019



In recent years, there has been a significant interest in middleware 
systems that leverage the cloud for interconnectivity. While these 
efforts were preceded by years of work on middleware for wireless sensor 
networks, ubiquitous and pervasive computing domains, and mobile 
environments, there has been nearly a decade of quiescence. Common 
commercial middleware approaches that support interaction in the 
Internet of Things have focused almost exclusively on cloud-centered 
organization, in which “things” are “dumb” and simply provide data from 
sensors and allow scripted control actions. Interpretation of data and 
the subsequent decision making are largely performed in centralized 
infrastructures or sometimes at the “edge” in highly capable 
infrastructure devices.



The aim of this workshop is to provide an outlet for a reexamination of 
the natural next step: systems that allow resource constrained, 
embedded, and potentially mobile devices to coordinate directly to share 
sensed data, come to joint collaborative control decisions, and to  act 
on those decisions, all without the requirement of a centralized 
controller. The workshop solicits novel research contributions in 
middleware designs, architectures, interaction models, and algorithms 
for these more opportunistic and unpredictable operating environments. 
In particular, contributions to the workshop are expected to address 
middleware concerns in a domain or application in a way that does not 
rely on persistent use of a cloud-based service. The workshop also 
welcomes vision and position papers on the future of such cloud-free 
middleware and their potential to exist synergistically with cloud-based 
approaches.



Organizers:     Christian Becker, University of Mannheim, Germany

Christine Julien, University of Texas at Austin, USA



Workshop website:  https://sites.google.com/utexas.edu/mise-2019/

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DFDS 2019: 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Fog Services Design



*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 6, 2019*



Smart spaces, such as smart cities and smart buildings, are 
proliferating into a massive scale, thereby, Internet of Things (IoT) 
data, services and applications are being pressed to move to the Cloud. 
IoT Cloud integration can enable ubiquitous cyber-physical services and 
powerful processing of IoT data beyond the capability of individual 
things. This has been recently extended from the core of the network to 
the edge of the network (i.e., Fog Computing) to address better mobility 
support, location awareness and low latency. Therefore, IoT applications 
will be further distributed throughout the network, including routers 
and dedicated computing nodes. With this new trend in sight, developing 
applications using cloud and fog computing resources introduces many 
challenges with respect to programming, networking, and service 
abstraction and distribution. In particular, in large-scale IoT 
applications with massive number of services, the way to model, develop 
and distributed services at device-, fog-, and cloud-levels is a top 
priority design challenge in this area.  This workshop aims to bring 
together experts from academia and industry that are working in 
distributed computing aspects of fog platforms, including 
middleware-related design concerns. The goal is to present and explore 
novel approaches and recent results of the research community and the 
industry bodies, and debate on and discuss priorities and challenges in 
the research agenda.



Organizers:     Amir Taherkordi, University of Oslo, Norway

Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria



Workshop website: http://www.dilute.no/dfsd


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SERIAL: 3rd Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for 
Distributed Ledgers



Submission Deadline: August 30, 2019



With the rise of digital currencies and distributed ledger 
infrastructures, a multitude of novel application scenarios are 
currently being discussed and evaluated. In essence, these technologies 
promise to crosscut and change a large variety of digital interactions. 
At the same time, the underlying infrastructures supporting these 
technologies are rapidly being developed and deployed, and their 
resilience and scalability is key for success.



The already 3rd SERIAL workshop, once again colocated with the 
Middleware conference, continues the successful series of scientific 
forums addressing the above themes. It aims to investigate system 
support to foster resilience and scalability of decentralized 
infrastructures such as distributed ledger ecosystems, but also 
addresses resilience support for more traditional Internet-based services.



Organizers:     François Taïani, Univ Rennes, IRISA, CNRS, Inria, France

Zsolt István, IMDEA Software, Spain

Franz J. Hauck, Ulm University, Germany



Workshop website: https://serial.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/serial19/

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M4IOT 2019: 6th International Workshop on Middleware and Applications 
for the Internet of Things



*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 6, 2019*



The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating new services and applications 
across various domains, including smart electricity grids, intelligent 
transportation, healthcare, smart homes, and energy management. As a 
consequence, a complex ecosystem of interconnected applications, 
services, and physical and virtual devices, characterized by a high 
degree of heterogeneity, emerges. Such a heterogeneity can be addressed 
by middleware platforms to abstract away the specificities of these 
devices, promote interoperability among them, and leverage the 
development of services and applications. In this ecosystem, enabled by 
middleware, devices share contextual data or receive control commands; 
services consume, process, and/or provide data; and applications 
leverage services and devices to fulfill users’ needs.



This workshop focuses on two fundamental components in such ecosystems, 
namely (i) the middleware to compose applications, services, and devices 
and (ii) the applications built on top of such middleware. Central 
topics of interest include the architecture of these components, how 
they process data, how they communicate with each other, and the process 
of how they are designed, implemented, and operated.



Organizers:     David Bermbach, TU Berlin, Germany

Everton Cavalcante, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

Stéphane Delbruel, Leuven University, Belgium

David Eyers, University of Otago, New Zealand

Danny Hughes, Leuven University, Belgium

Chantal Taconet, Télécom SudParis, France

Erik Wittern, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA



Workshop website: http://www.m4iot.org/

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DIDL: Workshop on Distributed Infrastructures for Deep Learning



*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 6, 2019*



Deep learning is a rapidly growing field of machine learning, and has 
proven successful in many domains, including computer vision, language 
translation, and speech recognition. The training of deep neural 
networks is resource intensive, requiring compute accelerators such as 
GPUs, as well as large amounts of storage and memory, and network 
bandwidth. Additionally, getting the training data ready requires a lot 
of tooling for data cleansing, data merging, ambiguity resolution, etc. 
Sophisticated middleware abstractions are needed to schedule resources, 
manage the distributed training job as well as visualize how well the 
training is progressing. Likewise, serving the large neural network 
models with low latency constraints can require middleware to manage 
model caching, selection, and refinement.



All the major cloud providers, including Amazon, Google, IBM, and 
Microsoft have started to offer cloud services in the last year or so 
with services to train and/or serve deep neural network models. In 
addition, there is a lot of activity in open source middleware for deep 
learning, including Tensorflow, Theano, Caffe2, PyTorch, and MXNet. 
There are also efforts to extend existing platforms such as Spark for 
deep learning workloads.



This workshop focuses on the tools, frameworks, and algorithms to 
support executing deep learning algorithms in a distributed environment. 
As new hardware and accelerators become available, the middleware and 
systems need to be able to exploit their capabilities and ensure they 
are utilized efficiently.



Organizers:     Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee, IBM Research, USA

Vatche Ishakian, IBM Research, USA

Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research, USA



Workshop website: https://didl-conf.github.io/didl3/index.html

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MECC 2019: 4th Workshop on Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets



*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 7, 2019*



There is a growing trend of interactive and resource-intensive (e.g., 
compute, storage, need for big data) applications on mobile devices 
today, and currently many such applications are provided using resources 
on infrastructural clouds. However, it is challenging to provide such 
applications using cloud resources when there is limited connectivity. 
Harvesting the resources present on nearby mobile devices and/or 
cloudlets is a viable solution to this problem.



Today, there is also increasing demand for middleware that offers higher 
level abstractions without hampering expressiveness and performance. 
However, many distributed systems today are designed for the datacenter, 
and their assumptions, such as that nodes use fast wired interconnects, 
no longer hold in edge environments.  In particular, edge clouds, such 
as those made up of only mobile devices at the edge, use unreliable 
wireless links. These unreliable links directly translate into 
unavailability and churn. Simultaneously, since mobile devices have 
limited energy resources, heavyweight distributed algorithms, such as 
coordination using a leader-based consensus protocol, are impractical.



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



Organizers:     Rolando Martins, University of Porto, Portugal

Hervé Paulino, University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal

Luis Veiga, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal



Workshop website: https://mecc2019.dcc.fc.up.pt/

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Containers: 5th International Workshop on Container Technologies and 
Container Clouds

*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 9, 2019*



Containers are a lightweight OS-level virtualization. In the recent 
years, container-based virtualization for applications has gained 
immense popularity thanks to the success of technologies like Docker. 
Container management is one of the key challenges of adopting this 
technology. As a result, management middleware like Kubernetes, Mesos, 
etc., are witnessing widespread adoption in the industry today. While 
Containers as a technology have reached an acceptable level of maturity, 
we see today that most of the challenges hindering the full scale 
adoption of this technology lies in the limitation of the existing 
middleware managing containerized workloads. Problems around 
scalability, security, high-availability, disaster recovery, and 
compliance are still active research areas that require innovative 
solutions.



The aim of this workshop is to shed the light on the main challenges and 
solutions of running containerized workloads in clustered environments.



Organizers:     Ali Kanso, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA

Seetharami R. Seelam, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA



Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/containers19/home

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ARM 2019: 18th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflexive Middleware



*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 13, 2019*



The Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM) workshop series started 
together with the ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference, 
with which it has been co-located every year since this first edition. 
ARM aims at providing researchers with a leading edge view on the state 
of the art in reflective and adaptive middleware, and on the challenging 
problems that remain unsolved. Past editions of the workshop have 
brought together experts involved in designing. and reusing adaptive 
systems at different system layers, including. architectural, OS, 
virtualization technology, and network layers, as well as in using 
techniques that. are complementary to reflection. The workshop series 
also seek to provide an exciting environment in which to leverage 
cooperation among researchers.



Organizers:     Paul Grace, Aston University, UK

Mohan Kumar, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Marco Netto, IBM Research, Brazil



Workshop website: https://arm2019.github.io/



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WoSC: 5th Workshop on Serverless Computing



*DEADLINE EXTENDED: September 15, 2019*



Over the last four to five years, Serverless Computing (Serverless) has 
gained an enthusiastic following in industry as a compelling paradigm 
for the deployment of cloud applications, and is enabled by the recent 
shift of enterprise application architectures to containers and 
micro-services. Many of the major cloud vendors, have released 
serverless platforms, including Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, 
Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions. This workshop brings 
together researchers and practitioners to discuss their experiences and 
thoughts on future directions of serverless research.



Serverless architectures offer different tradeoffs in terms of control, 
cost, and flexibility compared to distributed applications built on an 
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) substrate. For example, a serverless 
architecture requires developers to more carefully consider the 
resources used by their code (time to execute, memory used, etc.) when 
modularizing their applications. This is in contrast to concerns around 
latency, scalability, and elasticity, which is where significant 
development effort has traditionally been spent when building cloud 
services. In addition, tools and techniques to monitor and debug 
applications aren't applicable in serverless architectures, and new 
approaches are needed. As well, test and development pipelines may need 
to be adapted. Another decision that developers face are the 
appropriateness of the serverless ecosystem to their application 
requirements. A rich ecosystem of services built into the platform is 
typically easier to compose and would offer better performance. However, 
composing external services may be unavoidable, and in such cases, many 
of the benefits of serverless disappear, including performance and 
availability guarantees. This presents an important research challenge, 
and it is not clear how existing results and best practices, such as 
workflow composition research, can be applied to composition in a 
serverless environment.



Organizers:     Paul Castro, IBM Research, USA

Vatche Ishakian, Bentley University, USA

Vinod Muthusamy, IBM Research, USA

Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research, USA



Workshop website: https://www.serverlesscomputing.org/wosc5/



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All workshops have the notification deadline of September 27, 2019.