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CALL FOR PAPERS

The 19th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing
- ICSOC 2021 -
November 22-25, 2021
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
http://icsoc.org/

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ICSOC, the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, is the premier international forum for academics, industry researchers, developers, and practitioners to report and share groundbreaking work in service-oriented computing. ICSOC fosters cross-community scientific excellence by gathering experts from various disciplines, such as business-process management, distributed systems, computer networks, wireless and mobile computing, cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, networking, scientific workflows, services science, data science, management science, and software engineering.

ICSOC provides a high-quality forum for presenting results and discussing ideas that further our knowledge and understanding of the various aspects (e.g. application and system aspects) related to Service Computing applied to new application areas and gain insights into a variety of computing, networked, and cyber-physical systems ranging from mobile devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications to large-scale cloud computing systems and the smart grid.

ICSOC 2021, the 19th event in this series, will take place in Dubai, UAE from November 22 to November 25, 2021. Following on the ICSOC tradition, it will feature visionary keynote presentations, research and industry presentations, a vision track, workshops, tool demonstrations, tutorials, and a Ph.D. track. We invite interested researchers, students, practitioners, and professionals to submit their original contributions to the research and industry tracks of ICSOC 2021.

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+++ New submission/review model


Starting this year, ICSOC adopts a new submission/reviewing model.

***Anonymous submissions: ICSOC implements a double-blind reviewing process. Author names and affiliations should not appear in the paper. The authors should make a reasonable effort not to reveal their identities of institutional affiliations in the text, figures, photos, links, or other data that is contained in the paper. Authors' prior work should be preferably referred to in the third person; if this is not feasible, the references should be blinded. Submissions that violate these requirements will be rejected without review. The list of authors cannot be changed after the acceptance decision is made unless approved by the Program Chairs.

***Early submissions: Authors are invited to consider early submissions. In the early submission round, only papers submitted as full/regular papers will be considered, and they will go through a full peer-review process. An early submitted paper that is accepted will be included in the proceedings. An early submitted paper that is rejected can be still revised and submitted to the normal submission round by the given deadline. If the authors of an early submitted paper that is rejected decide to resubmit their paper to the normal submission round, they will have to include an appendix (2 pages) describing how they have addressed the comments received by the reviewers from the early submission.

***Normal submissions: Authors are also welcome to submit papers to the normal submission round by the given deadline. After the normal submission deadline, the papers resubmitted from the early submission round and those submitted only to the normal submission round will undergo a traditional review process. The decisions made from this normal review procedure will be final and no resubmission will be permitted afterwards.

It should be noted that unformatted papers and papers beyond the page limit may not be reviewed.

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Important Dates

Early paper submissions due: May 31st, 2021

Review comments to authors of early submission papers: July 13th, 2021

Normal paper submission due: August 22nd, 2021

Final notification to authors: September 20th, 2021

Camera ready manuscripts due: October 3rd, 2021

Author registration: October 3rd, 2021

Early bird registration: TBA

Conference dates: November 22-25, 2021

All deadlines are in Samoa Standard Time (SST = GMT – 11). Check the time in the SST Zone here: https://time.is/SST

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Special issues

As per its tradition, ICSOC 2021 will also feature some special issues in high impact journals. A selection of the top accepted papers will be invited for special issues in journals, the specific list will be announced soon.

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Areas of interest

ICSOC 2021 will be divided into two main tracks, the research track and the visionary track. While the visionary track targets visionary papers with high potential that may bring some impact in the future for the community, the research track will focus on the following four main areas.

---Focus Area-1: Service Oriented Technology Trends

This focus area targets outstanding, original contributions, including theoretical and empirical evaluations, as well as practical and industrial experiences, with emphasis on results that solve open research problems and have significant impact on the field of digital services and service-oriented computing.

Topics that are part of this focus area may include but are not limited to:

* Service-oriented Engineering
* Service design, specification, discovery, customization, composition, and deployment
* Service validation and test
* Service change management
* Intelligent context-aware interfaces
* Theoretical foundations of Service Engineering
* Transformation of monolithic applications to microservices
* Run-time Service Operations and Management
* Service execution middleware
* Service monitoring and adaptive management
* Workload compliance management
* Microservices deployment and management
* Security, privacy, and trust for services
* Secure service lifecycle development
* Privacy management aspects for services
* Contract based security approaches
* Secure service composition
* Trust management for services
* Services and Data
* Services for big data
* Service mining and analytics
* Data-provisioning services
* Services related linked open data
* Services on the Cloud
* Cloud service management
* Cloud workflow management
* Cloud brokers and coordination across multiple resource managers
* XaaS (everything as a service including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS)
* Workload partitioning, balancing, and transformation
* Services at the Edge
* Cloud and fog computing
* Edge service orchestration
* Lightweight service deployment and management
* Quality of Service (QoS) in edge services
* Security, privacy, and trust of edge services
* Services in the Internet of Things (IoT)/Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)
* Embedded and real-time services
* RFID, sensor data, and services related to the IoT/CPS
* Services for IoT/CPS platforms and applications
* Service oriented protocols for IoT/CPS applications
* Services in Organizations, Business, and Society
* Social networks and services
* Cost and pricing of services
* Service marketplaces and ecosystems
* Innovative service business models

--- Focus Area-2: Blockchain Technologies

A blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger that records and stores transactions among a number of interacting parties in a network. Each transaction must be validated via a consensus mechanism executed by the network participants before being permanently added as a new “block” at the end of the “chain.” Disruptive technologies such as blockchain, AI, services, and cloud enable companies and administrations to provide decentralized, trusted, transparent and user-centric digital services while enhancing user/consumer experience. These technologies have the ability to transform the way we use the internet and digital services globally.
Topics that are part of this focus area may include but are not limited to:

* Blockchain in digital services
* Block chain and smart business transactions
* Block chain and smart contracts
* Blockchain in the Internet of things (IoT)
* Blockchain in cyber physical systems
* Blockchain in edge and cloud computing
* Disintermediation and collaboration mechanisms in block chains
* Peer-to-peer networks
* Block chain platforms
* Blockchain in supply chain management
* Trust and security services in block chains
* Cutting edge cipher algorithms

--- Focus Area-3: Industry 4.0 Technologies

Industry 4.0 (or smart manufacturing) sets the foundations for completely connected factories that are characterized by the digitization and interconnection of supply chains, production equipment and production lines, and the application of the latest advanced digital information technologies to manufacturing activities. The manufacturing paradigm championed by the Industry 4.0 brings together processes, software services and systems, machines, devices, IoT, sensors, valves, actuators, manufacturing systems, and connected digital factories. All these computer-driven systems create a virtual copy of the physical world and help make decentralized decisions with a much higher degree of accuracy.

Topics that are part of this focus area may include but are not limited to:

* Digital twins and digital threads
* Digital product management
* Digital manufacturing
* Digital transformation
* Digital reality
* Embedded systems
* Internet of Things in Industry 4.0
* 3D printing/additive manufacturing techniques
* Machine-To-Machine communication for smart manufacturing
* Smarter analytics
* Manufacturing Intelligence
* Smart factories
* Smart asset management
* Smart Cyber-Security in Industry 4.0
* Blockchain in Industry 4.0

--- Focus Area-4: Smart services, Smart data and Smart applications

Smart data systems and services support the processing and integration of data and services into a meaningful unified view to enable more effective decision making and problem solving. The decisive criterion here is not necessarily the amount of data or services available, but smart content techniques that promote not only the collection and accumulation of related data and services, but also its context, and understanding. This requires finding useful insights and discovering patterns and trends within the data and services to reveal a wider picture that is more relevant to the problem in hand and react to them.

Smart applications are context aware, intelligent and autonomous industrial strength applications that incorporate data-driven, actionable contextual insights into the user experience to enable users to more efficiently complete a desired task usually taking the form of recommendations, estimates, and suggested next course of actions in context.

Topics that are part of this focus area may include but are not limited to:

* Smart Big Data
* Predictive Modelling
* Visualization & Augmented Reality
* Smarter Analytics
* Machine Learning
* Multidimensional Data
* Sensor Networks
* Smart cities
* Smart applications for the construction industry
* Smart transportation systems
* Smart logistics & distribution
* Smart agriculture and food chains
* Smart government
* Smart sensors & IoT for large scale industrial applications
* Traceability and Tracking
* Detection of data and key performance metrics to improve application efficiency
* Conceptual structures and knowledge architectures for smart applications
* Agile & DevOps methodologies for smart applications

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Paper Submission

The conference solicits outstanding original research and practice papers on all aspects of service-oriented computing. Papers should clearly demonstrate the research or practical contribution, the relevance to the field, and the relationship to prior work. Submitted papers will be evaluated according to their rigor, significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. All papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

Papers should be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS Formatting Guidelines. Submissions must be in English and must not exceed 15 pages. All papers must be submitted electronically to the Conference Submission System. Each paper must be submitted on or before the provided deadlines. Authors are kindly invited to respect the abstract submission deadline, set one week before the paper submission. The limit length of accepted papers should be 15 pages (including abstract, figures and references) with a maximum of 2 extra paid pages (€90 per extra page). The final submission should be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS Camera ready instructions.

For each accepted paper, at least one author must attend the conference and present the paper. The deadline for identifying and registering this individual author will be at the time when the camera-ready version is submitted.

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Best Paper Award

The Best Paper Award, sponsored by Springer, will be given to the paper that the Program Committee judges to be the best in quality, execution, and impact among all the accepted papers in the conference.

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Proceedings

All accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

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General Chairs

- Hakim Hacid, Zayed University, UAE
- Odej Kao, TU Berlin, Germany

Program Co-chairs

- Massimo Mecella, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
- Naouel Moha, École de Technologie Supérieure, Canada
- Helen Paik, University of New South Wales, Australia