ISMM is a forum for research in management of dynamically allocated memory. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: explicit storage allocation and deallocation; garbage collection algorithms and implementations; compiler analyses to aid memory management; interactions with languages, operating systems, and hardware, especially the memory system; memory management related tools; and empirical studies of allocation and referencing behavior in programs that make significant use of dynamic memory. ISMM solicits full-length papers on all areas of memory management. Survey papers that present an aspect of memory management with a new coherence are also welcome.

Submissions will be read by the program committee and designated reviewers, and judged on scientific merit, innovation, readability, and relevance. Papers previously published or already being reviewed by another conference are not eligible; if a closely related paper has been submitted to a journal, the authors must notify the program chair (see the SIGPLAN republication policy). Note: this year the submission deadline for ISMM is two days after the author notification deadline for PLDI, to make it possible for authors of relevant papers not accepted for PLDI to submit them to ISMM.

Submissions should be no more than 10 pages (including bibliography, excluding well marked appendices) in standard ACM SIGPLAN conference format: two columns, nine-point font (or larger) on a ten-point baseline (or larger), with columns 20pc (3.33in) wide and 54pc (9in) tall, and a column gutter of 2pc (0.33in). Detailed formatting guidelines are available at the URL below, along with formatting templates or style files for LaTeX. Papers that violate these guidelines will be rejected by the program chair. Program committee members are not required to read appendices, and so a paper should be intelligible without them. All accepted papers will appear in the published proceedings.

http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigplan/authorInformation.htm

Double-blind reviewing The ISMM paper reviewing process uses double-blind reviewing and provides an opportunity for rebuttal. In double-blind reviewing, the authors are anonymous to the reviewers, just as reviewers are anonymous to the authors. Authors are required to make reasonable efforts not to disclose their identities to reviewers. For example, you should not give your names nor mention your institution, research group or project name, etc. Where necessary for flow, you could say "the XYZ project" and add in a footnote that the name is withheld.
Discuss your own prior work in the third person, as you would other related work. Avoid making paper drafts too public, to reduce the possibility of inadvertently revealing your identities to reviewers. Authors will be able to provide reviewers with anonymous auxiliary material such as proofs and source code via the PC Chair (see below). Reviewers, for their part, will be honor-bound not to try to discover authors' identities, which will be known only by the program chair until a suitable point in the program committee's deliberations. We are using this process because research indicates that author anonymity reduces bias in reviewing.

Auxiliary Material When submitting papers to ISMM 09, authors will be able to provide the PC Chair with a URL for upload of auxiliary material. The URL itself will not be seen by reviewers. The authors may reference such material in their paper, noting that the material has been made available to the PC Chair. This facility may be used by authors to provide reviewers with useful information beyond the scope of the submitted paper, such as technical reports, proofs, and source code, without disclosing the authors' identity. Authors are obliged to make reasonable efforts to make all auxiliary material suitably anonymous. Authors are reminded that reviewers are under no obligation to read any auxiliary material.

Review committee ISMM 09 follows the practice introduced for ISSM 2008 of using a separate Review Committee (RC) as part of the reviewing process. The RC complements the Program Committee (PC) by providing expert reviews. The same reviewing standards apply to the RC as for the PC. However, RC members review only around four papers each, and do not participate in the PC meeting. The purpose of the RC is to increase the breadth and depth of the reviewer pool, thus increasing the likelihood of conflict-free expert reviews. This approach should be more practical with double-blind reviewing than ad hoc expert review assignments (as used by a number of conferences). The formal selection process, transparency of its constituency, and the fact that each reviewer will review multiple papers should increase the quality and accountability of reviews as compared to traditional ad hoc expert review assignments.

Rebuttal The rebuttal process will occur in early March 2009, and will give the authors opportunity to respond succinctly to factual errors in reviews, before the program committee meets to make its decisions. The committee may, but need not, respond to rebuttals or revise reviews at or after the committee meeting.

Submitted papers must be in English and formatted to print on US Letter (8.5 x 11 inches) paper. Submissions must contain an abstract and postal and electronic mailing addresses for at least one contact author. All papers must be submitted on-line, preferably in Portable Document Format (PDF), although the submission system will also accept PostScript.

Submissions due: January 29, 2009 (11:08pm EST)
Author response: March 5-6, 2009
Notification: March 12, 2009
Conference: June 19-20, 2009

Proceedings The proceedings will be published by the ACM. Authors should read the ACM Author Guidelines and related information. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference. For additional information please feel free to contact the Program Chair, Guy Steele (guy.steele@sun.com).