13th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
3-7 December, 2012
http://middleware2012.cs.mcgill.ca/

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IMPORTANT DATES
May 18, 2012--Abstract Submission
May 25, 2012--Paper Submission
August 10, 2012--Notification of Acceptance
31 August, 2012--Camera-ready paper due
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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”.

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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
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