Call for Paper for HotSWUp 2011: Third Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades

[Dagnat Fabien <fabien.dagnat@telecom-bretagne.eu>]

The following call for paper may be of interest to some members of the function community.

Fabien Dagnat

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                       CALL FOR PAPERS

HotSWUp 2011: Third Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades

                  (co-located with ICDE 2011)
                       Hannover, Germany
                        April 16, 2011

                    http://www.hotswup.org

              Submission deadline: 15 November 2010

OBJECTIVES

Actively-used software systems are upgraded regularly to incorporate
bug fixes and security patches or to keep up with the evolving
requirements. Whether upgrades are applied offline or online, they
significantly impact the system's performance and reliability.
Recently-introduced commercial products aim to address various aspects
of this problem; however, recent studies and a large body of anecdotal
evidence suggest that upgrades remain failure-prone, tedious, and
expensive.

The goal of the HotSWUp Workshop is to identify cutting-edge research
for supporting software system upgrades that are flexible, efficient,
robust, and easy to specify and apply.  Many diverse research areas
are concerned with building large, evolving, highly-available systems.
As such, HotSWUp seeks contributions from all these areas, ranging
from databases to distributed systems, and from programming languages
to software engineering, and separately reflected in conferences such
as SIGMOD, ICDE, SOSP, OSDI, OOPSLA, PLDI, ICSE, and FSE.  By seeking
contributions from both academic researchers and industry
practitioners, HotSWUp aims to combine novel ideas with experience
from upgrading real systems.  The present workshop aims to build on
the successes of HotSWUp'08 and HotSWUp'09 where the paper
presentations and lively discussions attracted a diverse audience of
researchers.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Upgrading Information Systems under Schema Evolution.
- Programming language / operating system / database support for
software upgrades.
- Improving the reliability of upgrades (e.g., support for upgrade
validation and for rollback after failures).
- Support for system or data restructuring (e.g., evolving APIs, 
changes to database schemas).
- Identifying dependencies between components and guaranteeing safe
interactions among mixed versions.
- Coordinating and disseminating upgrades in large-scale distributed
systems.
- Software upgrades and the Cloud Computing Infrastructure.
- Tools for preparing, testing, and applying software upgrades.
- Human factors in software upgrades (e.g., usability of upgrading
tools, common operator mistakes).


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We are interested in papers that address practical as well as
theoretical aspects of software upgrades from large scale to embedded
applications. Particularly welcome this year are submissions
concerning software upgrade issues in database systems.  Preferably,
submissions should fall into one of the following categories:

- Suggest how a successful approach can be applied in a different context
(e.g., static dependency analysis applied to distributed-system upgrades).
- Refute an old assumption about software upgrades (e.g., by presenting
negative results).
- Describe a new problem or propose a novel solution to an old problem.
- Present empirical evidence related to the practical implementation of
software upgrades.

Papers must not exceed 5 pages, in IEEE camera-ready format (templates
at
http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/pubservices/confpub/AuthorTools/conferenceTemplates.html).
Papers must be submitted electronically at http://www.hotswup.org.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline             15 November 2010
Acceptance notification         15 December 2010
Camera-ready deadline           3 January 2011
Workshop date                   16 April 2011


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Rida Bazzi, Arizona State University, USA (co-organizer)
Carlo Aldo Curino, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Fabien Dagnat, Telecom Bretagne, France
Johann Eder, University of Vienna, Austria
Michael Hicks, University of Maryland, College park, USA (co-organizer)
Manuel Oriol, University of York, UK 
George Papastefanatos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Paolo Papotti, Università Roma Tre, Italy
Jason Nieh, Columbia University, USA 
Xin Qi, Facebook, USA
Mark Segal, Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, USA
Liuba Shrira, Brandeis University, USA
Carlo Zaniolo, University of California, Los Angeles, USA (co-organizer)


MORE INFORMATION

Visit the workshop's homepage at:
http://www.hotswup.org