Workshop Scope

Relevance and Goals

Topics of Interest

Submissions

Important Dates

Organization

Program Committee

Call for Papers           Program
12th   Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM 2013)
Workshop Scope
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 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 smart phones 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 that enable the assemblage of trusted (reliable, secure. . . ) systems given high-level policies with goals and constraints.

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 [1–10] 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 11th 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 aspects:
  • 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; control theory;
  • current strong trends towards decentralized and diverse environments, including: 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);
  • investigate how developing 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., devices, OSs, virtualization technology, networks, applications); Reflection and adaptability may encompass the entire execution stack.
  • explore the connections with other techniques and research fields that are related to dynamic adaptation, such as autonomic computing, self-* systems, context-aware computing, and location-based services.

Relevance and Goals
Following the success of the past workshops in this series [1–9], ARM2012 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. The goal is to gather active researchers in this important field, so as to gain insight on their experiences and the new approaches being proposed. This edition follows the path initiated in the 2006 edition, by bringing together a wider group of researchers that are involved in designing and reusing adaptive systems at different system layers, including architectural, OS, virtualization technology, and network layers, as well as using different techniques that are complementary to reflection. The past four editions led us to believe that a forum that allows experts in these communities to interact with each other will support a more holistic approach to future research in adaptive and reflective systems. The workshop should provide an exciting environment in which to leverage cooperation among researchers, contributing to the development of middleware technology.


Topics of Interest
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, 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);
  • 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: realtime, 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, yields

Submissions
Research papers should not exceed 6 pages of text on letter paper in ACM format. Content should be work that is not previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere; Poster submissions should initially submit a 2 pages 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 submissions should initially submit a 2 pages abstract in ACM format, describing the contribution and content of the demo; we are particularly interested in demonstrations of adaptive middleware tools and solutions.  Submission site: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=armmwws2013
This workshop has its own ISBN and  will be included in the ACM digital library.
Extended versions of the best workshop papers will be invited to be published in a special issue of the Journal of Internet Services and Applications (Springer), edited by Fabio Kon and Gordon Blair.


Important Dates 
(GMT/UTC-12)
Paper Submission deadline: September 6, 2013
Acceptance notification: September 30, 2013
Author registration deadline: October, 2013 (see conf. site)
Camera-ready version due: October 11, 2013
Workshop: December 9-13, 2013


Organization
The workshop is to be organized by two members of the ARM community with the knowing of the ARM Steering Committee.


Organizing Committee:
  •  Paulo Ferreira (chair/main contact) - INESC-ID Lisboa / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, paulo.ferreira@inesc-id.pt
  •  Luís Veiga (chair) - INESC-ID Lisboa / Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal,  luis.veiga@inesc-id.pt
Steering Committee:
  • Gordon Blair - Lancaster University, UK
  • Renato Cerqueira - PUC-Rio, Brazil
  • Fábio M. Costa - Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
  • Geoff Coulson - Lancaster University, UK
  • Fabio Kon - University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • Nalini Venkatasubramanian - University of California at Irvine, USA

Program Committee

Alexandre    Sztajnberg  UERJ
Anders         Andersen    Tromso Univ.
Carolyn        Talcott        SRI  International
Didier           Donsez        Université Joseph Fourier - Grenoble 1
Edward        Curry           Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland
Fabio            Kon             University of São Paulo
Francisco    Silva            Universidade Federal do Maranho
Francois      Taiani          Université de Rennes 1 / IRISA
Frank           Eliassen        University of Oslo
Gordon       Blair             Lancaster Univ.
Gul              Agha              University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ian              Wakeman     University of Sussex
Markus       Endler           Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro
Nikolaos     Georgantas  Inria
Paolo          Bellavista      DEIS - University of Bologna
Paul             Grace            University of Southampton
Philippe      Merle             INRIA
Renato       Cerqueira     Computer Science Department, PUC-Rio
Richard       Schantz         BBN Technologies
Romain       Rouvoy          University Lille 1 - Inria
Sonia           Ben Mokhtar CNRS
Thomas       Ledoux            Ecole des Mines de Nantes
Yérom-David  Bromberg    LabRI


Past Editions
1.  MW 2000. Workshop on Reflective Middleware (RM2000).   http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/rm2000
2.  MW 2003. The 2nd Workshop on Reflective Middleware (RM’03).   http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~corsaro/RM2003
3.  MW 2004. The 3rd Workshop on Reflective Middleware (RM’04).   http://www.txcorp.com/~nanbor/RM2004
4.  MW 2005. The 4th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’05).  http://www.txcorp.com/~nanbor/ARM2005
5.  MW 2006. The 5th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’06).   http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arm06
6.  MW 2007. The 6th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’07).   http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arm
7.   MW 2008.  The 7th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’08).   http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ computing/arm2008
8.  MW 2009. The 8th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’09).  http://middleware2009.cs.uiuc.edu
9.  MW 2010. The 9th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’10).  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arm2010
10. MW 2011. The 10th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’11).  http:// http://arm11.lifl.fr/
11. MW 2012. The 11th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’11).  http:// http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~pjpf/arm2012/arm-2012.html/