MIDDLEWARE 2024 : The 25th ACM/IFIP International Conference Middleware 2024 (Preliminary CFP)

PRELIMINARY CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS
The annual ACM/IFIP Middleware conference is a major forum for discussing innovations and recent scientific advances in middleware systems with a focus on the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of distributed systems, platforms, and architectures for computing, storage, and communication. The conference will include a high-quality single-track technical program, invited speakers, an industrial track, panel discussions involving academic and industry leaders, poster and demonstration presentations, a doctoral symposium, tutorials, and workshops.


* Topics of Interest
The Middleware conference seeks original submissions of research papers on a diverse range of topics, particularly those identifying new research directions. The topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:
- Cloud and data centers
- Virtualization, auto-scaling, provisioning, and scheduling
- Data-intensive computing (big data) and data analytics
- Stream processing
- Middleware systems for machine learning
- Mobile and pervasive systems and services
- Middleware techniques for Internet-of-Things, smart cities
- Fog, edge computing
- Middleware for cyber-physical and real-time systems
- Energy and power-aware techniques
- Event-based, publish/subscribe, and peer-to-peer solutions
- Networking, network function virtualization, software-defined networking
- Middleware for multimedia systems
- Fault tolerance and consistency
- Blockchains
- Middleware support for security and privacy
- Monitoring, resource management, and analysis
- Programming abstractions and paradigms for middleware
- Reconfigurable, adaptable, and reflective middleware
- Critical reviews of middleware paradigms, e.g., object models, aspect orientation, etc.
- Methodologies and tools for middleware systems design, implementation, verification, and evaluation
- Serverless, Function-as-a-Service computing


The conference seeks original papers of three types:

Research Papers: These papers report original research on the above topics and will be evaluated on the significance of the problem, the novelty of the solution, advancement beyond prior work, sufficient supporting evidence, and clarity of the presentation.

Experimentation and Deployment Papers: These papers describe complete systems, platforms, and/or comprehensive experimental evaluations of alternative designs and solutions to well-known problems. The emphasis during the review of these papers will be more on the demonstrated usefulness and potential impact of the contributions, the extensive experimentation involved, and the quality and weight of the lessons learned.

Big Ideas Papers: These are papers that have the potential to open 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.

Short papers (NEW for MW’2024, only for Spring/Summer cycle): These papers hold up to the same standards and evaluation criteria of full research papers, but their content is presented in a more compact format.

WIP papers (NEW for MW’2024, only for Spring/Summer cycle): these papers tackle significant problems but only present seeds of the solutions, initial evaluation results, and preliminary discussions. The emphasis on the review for this papers will on the potential represented by the presented idea.


* Important Dates, Deadlines, Conditions
Middleware 2024 will have two submission deadlines, and we are providing the possibility of revision decisions for some papers that are deemed promising but somehow not yet complete. A more detailed explanation of the submission model is provided below.

First Round: Fall/Winter deadline:
- Full paper submissions due: December 1st, 2023
- Rebuttal: February 5-9, 2024
- Notification to authors (Accept/Accept with shepherding/Revise for Spring deadline/ Reject): February 26th, 2024
- Shepherded submissions due: March 18th, 2024
- Notifications of decisions of shepherded papers (Accept/Reject): April 1st, 2024
- Final paper files (camera-ready copy) due: April 15th, 2024

Second round: Spring/Summer deadline:
- Full paper submissions due: May 24th, 2024
- Rebuttal: August 19-23th, 2024
- Notification to authors (Accept/Accept with Shepherding/Revise for next calendar year/Reject): September 6th, 2024
- Shepherded submissions due: September 27th, 2024
- Notifications of decisions of shepherded papers (Accept/Reject): October 11th, 2024
- Final paper files (camera-ready copy) due: 25 October, 2024


* Key Changes and Conditions

Once-per-year submission: A research article may be submitted to ACM Middleware only once a year. Submissions rejected in the 1st Round (Fall Submission) of the ACM Middleware 2024 research track are NOT ELIGIBLE for submission to the 2nd Round (Spring Submission) of ACM Middleware 2024. Submissions rejected in the 2nd Round (Spring Submission) of ACM Middleware 2024 are NOT ELIGIBLE for submission to the 1st Round (Fall Submission) of ACM Middleware 2025. The only exception to this once-per-year submission is if the paper receives a revision decision, as described below.

One-shot revision: A paper submitted in a given round may receive a one-shot revision decision. Such a paper may be revised, given the information in the reviews, and resubmitted as part of the next review round. Such a revision decision will include a summary of the paper’s merits and a list of necessary changes required for the paper to be accepted at Middleware. Authors may then choose to resubmit a revised version of their work by addressing those needs by the deadline for the next round. Upon resubmission, the paper will be re-reviewed to judge whether it addresses the requirements requested; this review will be conducted, to the extent possible, by the same reviewers as the original review. Additional reviewers can be added. Papers receiving a revision decision for the 2nd Round of review (Spring Submission) will be invited to be resubmitted to the 1st Round (Fall Submission) for the next edition of the conference.

Only papers in the research (including short) and experimentation/deployment track will be eligible for the one-shot revision decision. Big ideas papers are not eligible for a revise/resubmit decision; they may be shepherded before acceptance.

Shepherding: Any paper in any category may be accepted conditionally to complete a shepherding process. These papers can be considered something of a “minor revision”. Such a decision will also be accompanied by a list of straightforward changes (expected to be reasonably addressed in a short amount of time). At least one PC member will check these changes before being accepted.


* Submission Guidelines
Your submission must be made within the due date specified above for a given round. Submitted papers must have at most 12 pages of technical content, including text, figures, and appendices, but excluding any additional pages for bibliographic references. Short and WIP papers must not be longer than 6 pages of technical content including text, figures, and appendices, but excluding any additional pages for bibliographic references.

Note that the review process will be doubly anonymous – authors’ names must not appear on the manuscript, and authors must make a good-faith attempt to anonymize their submissions. Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template). The font size has to be set to 10pt.

Please submit papers to https://middleware2024r1.hotcrp.com/ (Round 1) and https://middleware2024r2.hotcrp.com/ (Round 2).

A paper submitted to ACM Middleware 2024 cannot be under review for any other conference or journal during the entire time it is considered for Middleware 2024, and it must be substantially different from any previously published work. All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings. ACM reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference (e.g., removal from ACM Digital Library) if none of the authors attends the conference to present their paper.

The Middleware 2024 conference proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date will be when the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. Note that the official publication date may affect the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. A list of papers accepted from the 1st Round review process (Fall submission) will be posted on the ACM Middleware 2024 website in May 2024. In October, when the full program is available, paper titles and abstracts will be posted for all accepted papers from the spring and fall deadlines.

Note to Authors: By submitting your article for distribution in this Special Interest Group publication, you now grant to ACM the following non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights:
- to publish in print on the condition of acceptance by the editor
- to digitize and post your article in the electronic version of this publication
- to include the article in the ACM Digital Library and any Digital Library-related services
- to allow users to make a personal copy of the article for non-commercial, educational, or research purposes

However, as a contributing author, you retain the copyright to your article and ACM will refer requests for republication directly to you.


* Anonymity Requirements for Doubly-Anonymous Reviewing
Every research paper submitted to ACM Middleware 2024 will undergo a "doubly-anonymous" reviewing process: in addition to maintaining the anonymity of the reviewers of the papers, the PC members and reviewers will not know the identity of the authors. To ensure the anonymity of authorship, authors must at least do the following:
- Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
- Funding sources must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper under review; these can be added to accepted papers upon submission of the camera-ready manuscript.
- Non-anonymized links to the authors’ online content must be removed
- Research group members, or other colleagues or collaborators, must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper.
- The paper’s file name must not identify the authors of the paper.

Authors should also use care in referring to related past work. The solution is to reference past work in the third person (in the same way that one would reference work by anyone else). This allows you to set the context for your submission while at the same time preserving anonymity.

Despite the anonymity requirements, authors should still include all relevant work, including their own; omitting them could reveal the author’s identity by negation. However, self-references should be limited to the essential ones, and extended versions of the submitted paper (e.g., technical reports or URLs for downloadable versions) must not be referenced. The goal is to preserve anonymity while allowing the reader to grasp the context of the submitted paper fully. It is the responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity. Papers that do not follow the guidelines or potentially reveal the author's identity are subject to immediate rejection.


* Software and Data Artifact Availability for Accepted Papers
The authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit supporting materials made publicly available as “source materials” in the ACM Digital Library. The materials will be vetted by the Artifact Availability Evaluation process run by a separate committee. This submission is voluntary but encouraged and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers. Papers that go through the Artifact Availability Evaluation process successfully and are made available in the ACM Digital Library will receive a badge printed on the papers themselves.


The Middleware conference adheres strictly to the ACM policies against discrimination and harassment (https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/volunteer-resources/officers-manual/policy-against-discrimination-and-harassment).


* ACM Publication Policies
By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.


* Committees

PC-Co Chairs:
- Valerio Schiavoni (University of Neuchatel)
- Jin Zhi (Peking University)

TPC (to be completed):
- Antonio Barbalace (The University of Edinburgh)
- Alysson Bessani (LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade de Lisboa)
- Robert Birke (University of Turin)
- Sara Bouchenak (U. Lyon)
- Jérémie Decouchant (Delft University of Technology)
- Tobias Distler (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
- Dezun Dong (Nationa University of Defense Technology)
- David Eyers (University of Otago)
- Davide Frey (Inria)
- Roy Friedman (Technion)
- Pedro Garcia-Lopez (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
- Paul Grace (Aston University)
- Vincenzo Gulisano (Chalmers University of Technology)
- Yu Hua (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
- Hanhwi Jang (Ajou University)
- Xin Jin (Peking University)
- Christine Julien (The University of Texas at Austin)
- Vana Kalogeraki (Athens University of Economics and Business)
- Youngsok Kim (Yonsei University)
- Marios Kogias (Imperial College London)
- Boris Koldehofe (TU Ilmenau)
- Fabio Kon (University of São Paulo)
- Do Le Quoc (Huawei Research)
- Miguel Matos (IST, U. Lisboa & INESC-ID)
- Giovanni Mazzeo (University of Naples 'Parthenope')
- Subrata Mitra (Adobe Research)
- Roberto Palmieri (Leigh University)
- Marta Patiño (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
- Joao Paulo (INESC TEC / U. Minho)
- Fernando Pedone (University of Lugano)
- Romain Rouvoy (University of Lille)
- Mohammad Sadoghi (University of California, Davis)
- Takahiro Shinagawa (The University of Tokyo)
- Pierre Sutra (Télécom SudParis)
- Francois Taiani (Univ Rennes)
- Alexandru Uta (DFINITY)
- Roman Vitenberg (University of Oslo)