CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS
The annual ACM/IFIP Middleware conference (https://middleware-conf.github.io/2024/) is a major forum for discussing innovations and recent scientific advances in middleware systems with a focus on the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of distributed systems, platforms, and architectures for computing, storage, and communication. The conference will include a high-quality single-track technical program, invited speakers, an industrial track, panel discussions involving academic and industry leaders, poster and demonstration presentations, a doctoral symposium, tutorials, and workshops.


* Topics of Interest
The Middleware conference seeks original submissions of research papers on a diverse range of topics, particularly those identifying new research directions. The topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:
- Cloud and data centers
- Virtualization, auto-scaling, provisioning, and scheduling
- Data-intensive computing (big data) and data analytics
- Stream Processing
- Middleware systems for machine learning
- Mobile and pervasive systems and services
- Middleware techniques for Internet-of-Things, smart cities
- Fog, Edge computing
- Middleware for cyber-physical and real-time systems
- Energy and power-aware techniques
- Event-based, publish/subscribe, and peer-to-peer solutions
- Networking, network function virtualization, software-defined networking
- Middleware for multimedia Systems
- Fault tolerance and consistency
- Blockchains
- Middleware support for security and privacy
- Monitoring, resource management, and analysis
- Programming abstractions and paradigms for middleware
- Reconfigurable, adaptable, and reflective middleware
- Critical reviews of middleware paradigms, e.g., object models, aspect orientation, etc.
- Methodologies and tools for middleware systems design, implementation, verification, and evaluation
- Serverless, Function-as-a-Service computing

The conference seeks original papers of five types:

Research Papers: These papers report original research on the above topics and will be evaluated on the significance of the problem, the novelty of the solution, advancement beyond prior work, sufficient supporting evidence, and clarity of the presentation.

Experimentation and Deployment Papers: These papers describe complete systems, platforms, and/or comprehensive experimental evaluations of alternative designs and solutions to well-known problems. The emphasis during the review of these papers will be more on the demonstrated usefulness and potential impact of the contributions, the extensive experimentation involved, and the quality and weight of the lessons learned.

Big Ideas Papers: These are papers that have the potential to open up new research directions. For such papers, the potential to motivate new research is more important than full experimental evaluation, though some preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of the approach or idea is important.

Short Papers (NEW for MW’2024): These papers hold up to the same standards and evaluation criteria of full research papers, but their content is presented in a more compact format.

Work-in-progress (WIP) Papers (NEW for MW’2024): These papers tackle significant problems but only present seeds of the solutions, initial evaluation results, and preliminary discussions. The emphasis on the review for this papers will on the potential represented by the presented idea.


* Important Dates, Deadlines, Conditions
Middleware 2024 will have two submission deadlines, and we are providing the possibility of revision decisions for some papers that are deemed promising but somehow not yet complete. A more detailed explanation of the submission model is provided below.

First Round: Fall/Winter deadline:
- Full paper submissions due: December 1st, 2023
- Rebuttal: February 5-9, 2024
- Notification to authors (Accept/Accept with shepherding/Revise for Spring deadline/ Reject): February 26th, 2024
- Shepherded submissions due: March 18th, 2024
- Notifications of decisions of shepherded papers (Accept/Reject): April 1st, 2024
- Final paper files (camera-ready copy) due: April 15th, 2024

Second round: Spring/Summer deadline:
- Full paper submissions due: May 24th, 2024
- Rebuttal: August 19-23th, 2024
- Notification to authors (Accept/Accept with Shepherding/Revise for next calendar year/Reject): September 6th, 2024
- Shepherded submissions due: September 27th, 2024
- Notifications of decisions of shepherded papers (Accept/Reject): October 11th, 2024
- Final paper files (camera-ready copy) due: 25 October, 2024


* Key Changes and Conditions

Resubmissions to next cycle: a research article rejected in the 1st Round (Fall Submission) can be resubmitted to the next cycle (Spring Submission) if explicitly allowed by the final decision of the program committee. Similarly, a research article rejected in the 2st Round (Spring Submission) can be resubmitted to the next cycle (Fall Submission 2025) if explicitly allowed by the final decision of the program committee. Authors, at submission time, will have to prove they have taken into account the provided reviews and made a reasonable effort to convey the efforts taken to improve their submission. Such resubmission will count as a new submission. In such scenarios, the reviews can be forwarded from one cycle to the next one, and, as much as possible, to the same set of reviews. You can think of this scenario as a major review decision.

One-shot revision: A paper submitted in a given round may receive a one-shot revision decision. Such a paper may be revised, given the information in the reviews, and resubmitted as part of the next review round. Such a revision decision will include a summary of the paper’s merits and a list of necessary changes required for the paper to be accepted at Middleware. Authors may then choose to resubmit a revised version of their work by addressing those needs by the deadline for the next round. Upon resubmission, the paper will be re-reviewed to judge whether it addresses the requirements requested; this review will be conducted, to the extent possible, by the same reviewers as the original review. Additional reviewers can be added. Papers receiving a revision decision for the 2nd Round of review (Spring Submission) will be invited to be resubmitted to the 1st Round (Fall Submission) for the next edition of the conference. You can think of this scenario as a minor review decision.

Only papers in the research (including short) and experimentation/deployment track will be eligible for the one-shot revision decision. Big ideas papers are not eligible for a revise/resubmit decision; they may be shepherded before acceptance.

Shepherding: Any paper in any category may be accepted conditionally to complete a shepherding process. These papers can be considered something of a “minor revision”. Such a decision will also be accompanied by a list of straightforward changes (expected to be reasonably addressed in a short amount of time). At least one PC member will check these changes before being accepted.


* Submission Guidelines
Your submission must be made within the due date specified above for the specific rounds. Regular papers must have at most 12 pages of technical content, including text, figures, and appendices, but excluding any number of additional pages for bibliographic references. Short and WIP papers must not be longer than 6 pages of technical content including text, figures, and appendices, but excluding any additional pages for bibliographic references. Note that submissions must be doubly anonymous - authors’ names must not appear on the manuscript, and authors must make a good-faith attempt to anonymize their submissions. Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template). The font size has to be set to 10pt.

Please submit papers to https://middleware2024r1.hotcrp.com/ (Round 1) and https://middleware2024r2.hotcrp.com/ (Round 2).

A paper submitted to ACM Middleware 2024 cannot be under review for any other conference or journal during the entire time it is considered for Middleware 2024, and it must be substantially different from any previously published work. All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings. ACM reserves the right to exclude a paper from distribution after the conference (e.g., removal from ACM Digital Library) if none of the authors attends the conference to present their paper.

The Middleware 2024 conference proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date will be when the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. Note that the official publication date may affect the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. A list of papers accepted from the 1st Round review process (Fall submission) will be posted on the ACM Middleware 2024 website in May 2024. In October, when the full program is available, paper titles and abstracts will be posted for all accepted papers from the spring and fall deadlines.

Note to Authors: By submitting your article for distribution in this Special Interest Group publication, you now grant to ACM the following non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights:
- to publish in print on condition of acceptance by the editor
- to digitize and post your article in the electronic version of this publication
- to include the article in the ACM Digital Library and any Digital Library-related services
- to allow users to make a personal copy of the article for non-commercial, educational or research purposes

However, as a contributing author, you retain the copyright to your article and ACM will refer requests for republication directly to you.


* Anonymity Requirements for Doubley-Anonymous Reviewing
Every research paper submitted to ACM Middleware 2024 will undergo a ''doubly-anonymous'' reviewing process: in addition to maintaining the anonymity of the reviewers of the papers, the PC members and reviewers will not know the identity of the authors. To ensure the anonymity of authorship, authors must at least do the following:
- Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
- Funding sources must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper under review; these can be added to accepted papers upon submission of the camera-ready manuscript.
- Non-anonymized links to the authors’ online content must be removed.
- Research group members, or other colleagues or collaborators, must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper.
- The paper’s file name must not identify the authors of the paper.

Authors should also use care in referring to related past work. The solution is to reference past work in the third person (in the same way that one would reference work by anyone else). This allows you to set the context for your submission while at the same time preserving anonymity.

Despite the anonymity requirements, authors should still include all relevant work, including their own; omitting them could reveal the author's identity by negation. However, self-references should be limited to the essential ones, and extended versions of the submitted paper (e.g., technical reports or URLs for downloadable versions) must not be referenced. The goal is to preserve anonymity while allowing the reader to grasp the context of the submitted paper fully. It is the responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity. Papers that do not follow the guidelines or potentially reveal the author's identity are subject to immediate rejection.


* Software and Data Artifact Availability for Accepted Papers
The authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit supporting materials made publicly available as "source materials" in the ACM Digital Library. The materials will be vetted by the Artifact Availability Evaluation process run by a separate committee. This submission is voluntary but encouraged and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers. Papers that go through the Artifact Availability Evaluation process successfully and are made available in the ACM Digital Library will receive a badge printed on the papers themselves.


The Middleware conference adheres strictly to the ACM policies against discrimination and harassment (https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/volunteer-resources/officers-manual/policy-against-discrimination-and-harassment).


* ACM Publication Policies
By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.


* Program Committee
Program Committee Co-Chairs
- Zhi Jin, Peking University, China
- Valerio Schiavoni, Universite de Neuchatel, Switzerland

Program Committee Members
- Alexandru Uta (DFINITY, Switzerland)
- Alysson Bessani (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
- Antonio Barbalace (The University of Edinburgh, Scotland)
- Boris Koldehofe (The Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany)
- Chen Xu (East China Normal University, China)
- Christine Julien (The University of Texas at Austin, US)
- Claudia-Lavinia Ignat (INRIA Nancy-Grand Est, France)
- David Eyers (University of Otago, New Zealand)
- Davide Frey (INRIA Rennes, France)
- Dezun Dong (Nationa University of Defense Technology, China)
- Djob Mvondo (University of Rennes, France)
- Fabio Kon (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
- Fernando Pedone (University of Lugano, Switzerland)
- Guillaume Rosinosky (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
- Han Rui (Beijing Institute of Technology, China)
- Hanhwi Jang (Ajou University, South Korea)
- Jérémie Decouchant (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
- Jiangtao Wang (Coventry University, England)
- João Tiago Paulo (INESC TEC / University of Minho, Portugal)
- Kuan-Hsun Chen (University of Twente, Netherlands)
- Lei Xie (Nanjing University, China)
- Linghe Kong (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China)
- Liting Lu (University of California, Santa Cruz, US)
- Marios Kogias (Imperial College London, England)
- Marta Patiño (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
- Matej Pavlovic (Protocol Labs Research, Switzerland)
- Miguel Matos (Universidade de Lisboa / INESC-ID, Portugal)
- Mohammad Sadoghi (University of California, Davis, US)
- Nalini Venkatasubramanian (University of California, Irvine, US)
- Paul Grace (Aston University, England)
- Pedro Garcia-Lopez (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain)
- Pierre Sutra (Télécom SudParis, France)
- Quoc Do Le (Huawei Munich Research Center, Germany)
- Robert Birke (University of Turin, Italy)
- Roberto Palmieri (Leigh University, US)
- Roman Vitenberg (University of Oslo, Norway)
- Roy Friedman (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
- Rüdiger Kapitza (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
- Sara Bouchenak (INSA Lyon, France)
- Saurabh Bagchi (Purdue University, US)
- Subrata Mitra (Adobe Research)
- Takahiro Shinagawa (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
- Thomas Pasquier (University of British Columbia, Canada)
- Tobias Distler (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
- Valerio Schiavoni (Universite de Neuchatel, Switzerland)
- Vana Kalogeraki (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
- Vincenzo Gulisano (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
- Xin Jin (Peking University, China)
- Youngsok Kim (Yonsei University, South Korea)
- Yu Hua (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China)
- Zhi Jin (Peking University, China)