1ST WORKSHOP ON MIDDLEWARE FOR THE EDGE
Collocated with ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware 2022, Québec, Canada, 7-11 November, 2022


CALL FOR PAPERS
The increasing adoption of both cloud and edge computing is being driven by classical architectures which are based on well-known centralized models to manage the life cycle of hard and software resources. The introduction of geo-distributed or decentralized clouds can offer an alternative to established commercial providers, allowing for a democratization of access to computation while acting as a reinforcement to self-sovereign, namely in the EU. Moreover, as shown in recent large-scale events, such as the current COVID-19 outburst, centralized infrastructures pose a significant threat to the sustainability of our societal fabric by targeting our economy, security, and personal freedoms.

To overcome these limitations, the MiddleWedge workshop aims to address the decentralization and democratization of computation and storage. By offering novel models and mechanisms to ensure secure, efficient and safety management of computation, data and communications, the research community and industry can bootstrap the edge computing paradigm and offer concrete solutions to the market. There are multiple challenges that are considered to be core to MiddleWedge, namely:

- Identity and Access Management: Explore decentralized management, authentication and authorization as a way to remove centralized solutions, as it would become a single-point of failure forcing all nodes to trust this specific third party. Using concepts introduced by self-sovereignty solutions, such as Sovrin, to provide decentralized identifiers, e.g., personas or aliases, to provide privacy to the end users. Moreover, there is a need for novel solutions that support decentralized authorization and access control. The problem of current solutions is that they store metadata and ACLs with the network overlay, and thus forcing delegation;

- Management of the resource life cycle: Similarly to the IAM challenges, the management of the resources should be revisited to decentralized approaches. More precisely, we expect that edge resources will be managed by multiple independent entities, each one in charge of controlling one part of the edge infrastructures, delivering this way independence, as well as autonomy of the resources. It is noteworthy that the management of the life cycle relies on various mechanisms including monitoring of resources, controller loops, deployment/reconfiguration techniques that should be explored;

- Scheduling: Exploring novel paths to make scheduling and service placement fully decentralized, able to seamlessly leverage devices with heterogeneous architectures and capabilities, in an efficient and scalable manner. This entails employing self-organizing algorithms continuously running, matching requests and resources preferably locally (while aiming to converge towards global balancing).; The use of reinforcement techniques can be relevant to predict future usages of the infrastructures, as well as the evolution of the needs of applications, providing important hints for the scheduling decisions, with the goal of optimising different objectives (efficiency, energy, etc.);

TOPICS
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Decentralized identity management and access control
- Decentralized middleware/resource management systems
- Decentralized scheduling strategies
- Novel storage systems for edge clouds, with special focus on geo-aware storage engines
- Mechanisms for the integration of edge clouds and public clouds
- Security mechanisms for edge clouds including, including but not limited to, storage and computation
- Privacy preserving algorithms that leverages edge clouds
- Trust and reputation for edge clouds
- Distributed ledgers for supporting edge clouds
- Lightweight replication and fault-tolerance algorithms
- Lightweight computation sandboxing for edge clouds
- Tools for testing and benchmarking for edge clouds
- Experimental deployments and applications
- Novel theoretical approaches for churn tolerance
- Networking coding approaches for edge clouds
- Programming languages for edge clouds
- P2P overlays for edge clouds
- Gossip based protocols for edge clouds
- Computational frameworks for edge clouds
- Programming models and abstractions to manage inter-cloud interactions
- Distributed coordination and cooperation for edge clouds

PUBLICATION OF ACCEPTED PAPERS
All accepted papers will appear in a Middleware 2022 companion proceedings, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library prior to the workshop.

At least one of the authors will have to register for the workshop and present the paper.

Authors should also acknowledge the following disclaimer by the ACM: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)


IMPORTANT DATES (EXTENDED)
- Paper submission: September 09, 2022
- Paper notification: September 23, 2022
- Camera-ready: October 3, 2022
Note that all deadlines are 23:59 in the GMT/UTC-12 timezone.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
MiddleWedge will receive proposals for communication in the form of full research papers of at most 6 pages, and short research papers of at most 3 pages, excluding references. Short papers should either describe work-in-progress, or should describe visions of challenges, problems, and potential research directions in Edge computing. Content should be work that is not previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere.

All submissions should be in PDF and must follow the ACM template. Submissions must have authors information, text, figures, references and appendices (if applicable). Submissions that do not respect the formatting requirement may be rejected without review.

Reviewing is single-blind. This means that the names and affiliations of the authors must appear in the submitted papers. Each paper will receive at least three reviews from members of the program committee.

Submissions should be done through HotCRP at the following URL:
https://middlewedge22.hotcrp.com/

ORGANIZATION

General and Technical Program Co-Chairs:
- Rolando Martins (University of Porto, Portugal)
- Luis Veiga (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal)
- Adrien Lebre (IMT Atlantique/LS2N-INRIA)

The program co-chairs can be contacted using the following emails:
- rmartins at dcc.fc.up.pt
- luis.veiga at inesc-id.pt
- adrien.lebre at inria.fr

Technical Program Committee:
- Davy Preuveneers (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
- Erik Elmroth (UMU)
- Paolo Bellavista (UNIBO)
- Jalil Boukhobza (ENSTA Bretagne)
- David Bermbach (TU Berlin)
- Kai Rannenberg (Goethe University)
- Thierry Coupaye (Orange Labs)
- Etienne Riviere (UC Louvain)
- Guillaume Pierre (University of Rennes)
- David Eyers (University of Otago)
- Felix Freitag (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
- Alysson Bessani (University of Lisbon)
- Odorico Mendizabal (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande)

Publicity Chairs:
- João Soares (University of Porto)