[TYPES/announce] ICE'08: First Call for Papers

[Angelo Troina]

[Apologise for multiple copies]

1st Interaction and Concurrency Experience (ICE'08)
Synchronous and Asynchronous Interactions in Concurrent Distributed Systems

Satellite workshop of ICALP 2008
6th of July 2008
Reykjavik, Iceland

Homepage: http://ice08.dimi.uniud.it/

Interaction and Concurrency Experiences (ICEs) is intended as a series
of international scientific meetings oriented to researchers in
various fields of theoretical computer science. The timeliness and
novelty of these events relies both on the variety of the topics that
will be treated on each event and on the adopted paper selection
mechanism.

Every experience will focus on a different specific topic which
affects several areas of computer science; A thorough scientific
debate among PC and authors of submitted papers will parallel the
reviewing process; After the paper selection phase, papers will be
published on the web and the discussion will be extended to
perspective participants.

-- Scope --

The scope of this first experience is to include theoretical and
applied aspects of interactions and the synchronization mechanisms
used among actors of concurrent or distributed systems. The workshop
intends to attract researchers interested in models, verification,
tools, and programming primitives concerning such complex
interactions.

Synchronisation mechanisms are one of the key aspects in concurrency
and they are becoming enormously relevant in modern distributed
systems. Theoretical models, design and verification of interaction
protocols and programming practice must take synchronisations into
account for specifying, implementing and reasoning on systems where
computations are spread across possibly many actors that interact
within a precise interaction framework.

At a low level of abstraction, systems can be classified according to
a wide spectrum, ranging between the two extremes of (completely)
synchronous or asynchronous interactions. In fact, such a
classification can be given according to the assumptions made on,
e.g., the number of participants or the time interactions need to be
effected. Significantly, the behaviour of such systems can be
investigated using different assumptions that yield different
expressiveness or complexity results.

Several recent theoretical results shed light on the interrelations
between synchronous and asynchronous interaction mechanisms (e.g.,
expressiveness results for distributed algorithms, relations among
observational semantics of (a)synchronous models). Interaction
mechanisms have also been studied in relation to other features of
systems such as mobility (e.g., name passing process calculi,
graph-based models).

-- Topics --

Topics of interest include, but shall not be limited to:
- models, logic and types for interactions;
- synchronous/asynchronous mechanisms;
- expressiveness results;
- timed and hybrid interactions;
- verification, analysis and tools;
- programming primitives for interactions;
- interactions as coordination mechanisms;
- interactions inspired by emerging computational models (systems
   biology, quantum computing, etc.).

-- Selection Procedure --

The workshop proposes an innovative paper selection process based on
an interactive discussion amongst authors and PC members. We are
confident that an interactive selection phase could considerably
improve the quality of the papers, the reviews and the discussion
during the workshop.

After the submission deadline expires, each PC member will select a
number of suitable papers to review before the start of the discussion
phase. Each paper will have at least three anonymous reviewers.

At the beginning of the discussion, each submitted paper will be
published on a Wiki and associated with a discussion forum. The access
to the forum will be restricted to the authors of the associated paper
and to all the PC members. The latter will be able to anonymously post
comments/questions which the authors will reply to. Authors will
obviously have access only to forums associated with their own papers.
Thus, the discussion on forums (and hence the reviewing process of
papers) may be enhanced by the additional comments of interested PC
members.

-- The Public Wiki --

After the notification, the accepted papers will be published on a
public forum, the rationale being to initiate public discussions that
will trigger and stimulate the scientific debate of the workshop. We
argue that this will drive the workshop debate and let perspective
participants to interact with each other well in advance with respect
to the modus operandi of a traditional event.

-- Submission Guidelines --

Papers must report previously unpublished work and not be submitted
concurrently to another conference with refereed
proceedings. Programme Committee members, barring the co-chairs, may
(and indeed are encouraged) to contribute. Accepted papers must be
presented at the workshop by one of the authors.

There is no specific page limit, but authors should strive for
brevity. Details of the submission mechanism will follow in due
course.

-- Dissemination --

The post-proceedings of the workshop will be published in a volume of
the Electronic Notes on Theoretical Computer Science series (under
negotiation).  The publication of a special issue on ICE08 in an
international scientific journal is also under negotiation. More
precise information will follow.

-- Important Dates --

- Abstract submission: 14 April 2008
- Submission deadline: 18 April 2008
- Reviews due: 11 May 2008
- Discussion: from 12 May to 21 May 2008
- Notification to authors: 25 May 2008
- Workshop: 6 July 2008

-- Program Committee --

- Simon Bliudze (VERIMAG)
- Michele Boreale (Università di Firenze)
- Marco Carbone (Queen Mary)
- Vincent Danos (Paris VII & CNRS)
- Azadeh Farzan (Carnegie Mellon University)
- Fabio Gadducci (Università di Pisa)
- Blaise Genest (CNRS, Rennes)
- Ichiro Hasuo (University of Kyoto - Radboud University Nijmegen)
- Thomas Hildebrandt (ITU-Copenhagen)
- Barbara Koenig (University of Duisburg-Essen)
- Jean Krivine (Ecole Polytechnique)
- Ruggero Lanotte (Università dell'Insubria)
- Francesco Logozzo (Microsoft Research)
- Gavin Lowe (Oxford)
- Hernan Melgratti (UBA, Buenos Aires)
- Mohamad Reza Mousavi (Eindhoven University)
- Julian Rathke (University of Southampton)
- Frank Valencia (École Polytechnique)
- Daniele Varacca (Paris VII)
- Herbert Wiklicky (Imperial College)

-- Invited Speakers --

- Catuscia Palamidessi (École Polytechnique)
- To be announced

-- ICEcreamers --

- Filippo Bonchi (Università di Pisa)
- Davide Grohmann (Università di Udine)
- Paola Spoletini (Politecnico di Milano)
- Angelo Troina (Università di Torino)
- Emilio Tuosto (University of Leicester)