The International Conference on Systems (ICONS 2008) continues a series of events covering a broad spectrum of topics. The conference covers fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software and hardware systems. Several tracks are proposed to treat the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learnt.

In the last years, new system concepts have been promoted and partially embedded in new deployments. Anticipative systems, autonomic and autonomous systems, self-adapting systems, or on-demand systems are systems exposing advanced features. These features demand special requirements specification mechanisms, advanced behavioral design patterns, special interaction protocols, and flexible implementation platforms. Additionally, they require new monitoring and management paradigms, as self-protection, self-diagnosing, self-maintenance become core design features.

The design of application-oriented systems is driven by application-specific requirements that have a very large spectrum. Despite the adoption of uniform frameworks and system design methodologies supported by appropriate models and system specification languages, the deployment of application-oriented systems raises critical problems. Specific requirements in terms of scalability, real-time, security, performance, accuracy, distribution, and user interaction drive the design decisions and implementations.

This leads to the need for gathering application-specific knowledge and develop particular design and implementation skills that can be reused in developing similar systems.

Validation and verification of safety requirements for complex systems containing hardware, software and human subsystems must be considered from early design phases. There is a need for rigorous analysis on the role of people and process causing hazards within safety-related systems; however, these claims are often made without a rigorous analysis of the human factors involved. Accurate identification and implementation of safety requirements for all elements of a system, including people and procedures become crucial in complex and critical systems, especially in safety-related projects from the civil aviation, defense health, and transport sectors.

Fundamentals on safety-related systems concern both positive (desired properties) and negative (undesired properties) aspects. Safety requirements are expressed at the individual equipment level and at the operational-environment level. However, ambiguity in safety requirements may lead to reliable unsafe systems. Additionally, the distribution of safety requirements between people and machines makes difficult automated proofs of system safety. This is somehow obscured by the difficulty of applying formal techniques (usually used for equipment-related safety requirements) to derivation and satisfaction of human-related safety requirements (usually, human factors techniques are used).

The conference has the following tracks:

Systems' theory and practice

System engineering

System instrumentation

Embedded systems and systems-on-the-chip

Target-oriented systems [emulation, simulation, prediction, etc.]

Specialized systems [sensor-based, mobile, multimedia, biometrics, etc.]

Validation systems

Security and protection systems

Advanced systems [expert, tutoring, self-adapting, interactive, etc.]

Application-oriented systems [content, eHealth, radar, financial, vehicular, etc.]

Safety in industrial systems

Micro/nano structures and systems

Complex systems

Real-time systems

Systems scalability

Industrial applications [robotics, production, accounting and billing, e-commerce, etc.

We welcome technical papers presenting research and practical results, position papers addressing the pros and cons of specific proposals, such as those being discussed in the standard fora or in industry consortia, survey papers addressing the key problems and solutions on any of the above topics short papers on work in progress, and panel proposals.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, standards, implementations, running experiments and applications. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited topic areas. Industrial presentations are not subject to these constraints. Tutorials on specific related topics and panels on challenging areas are encouraged.

The following track topics are expected to be covered:

Systems' Theory and Practice

Systems design methodologies and techniques
Formal methods to specify systems' behavior
Online and offline systems
Open and closed systems
Centralized and distributed systems
Proactive and reactive systems
System robustness
Systems scalability
Fault-tolerant systems
Feedback systems
High-speed systems
Delay tolerant systems

Systems engineering

Systems requirements
Systems modeling
Systems development lifecycle
System-of-systems
Systems ergonomics
Subsystem interactions
Systems decomposition
Systems integration

System Instrumentation

Metering embedded sensors
Composing multi-scale measurements
Monitoring instrumentation
Smart sensor-based systems
Calibration and self-calibration systems
Instrumentation for prediction systems

Embedded systems and systems-on-the-chip

Real-time embedded systems
Programming embedded systems
Controlling embedded systems
High speed embedded systems
Designing methodologies for embedded systems
Performance on embedded systems
Updating embedded systems
Wireless/wired design of systems-on-the-chip
Testing embedded systems
Technologies for systems processors
Migration to single-chip systems

Target-oriented systems [emulation, simulation, prediction, etc.]

Information systems
Real-time systems
Software systems
Hardware systems
Emulation systems
Simulation systems
Prediction systems

Specialized systems [sensor-based, mobile, multimedia, biometrics, etc.]

Sensor-based systems
Biometrics systems
Mobile and fixed systems
Ubiquitous systems
Nano-technology-based systems
Multimedia systems

Validation systems

Test systems
Validation systems
Performance measurement systems
Maintenance systems

Security and protection systems

Security systems
Vulnerability detecting systems
Intrusion detection systems
Intrusion avoidance systems
Presence detection systems
Monitoring systems
Management systems
Alert systems
Defense systems
Emergency systems

Advanced systems [expert, tutoring, self-adapting, interactive, etc.]

Expert systems
Tutoring systems
Highly interactive systems
Anticipative systems
On-demand systems
GRID systems
Autonomic systems
Autonomous systems
Self-adapting systems
Adjustable autonomic systems
High performance computing systems
Mission critical systems

Application-oriented systems [content, eHealth, radar, financial, vehicular, etc.]

Web-cashing systems
Content-distributed systems
Accounting and billing systems
E-Health systems
E-Commerce systems
Radar systems
Navigation systems
Systems for measuring physical quantities
Earthquake detection and ranking systems
Financial systems
Robotics systems
Vehicular systems
Entertainment systems
Gaming systems
Speech recognition system

Safety in industrial systems

Fundamentals on system safety
Safety of software systems and software engineering
Safety requirements
Safety for critical systems
Engineering for system robustness and reliability
Control of mission critical systems
Safety-oriented system design
Human tasks and error models
Hazard analysis
Cost and effectiveness of system safety
Verification and validation of safety
Safety tools
Evaluation of safety data, and mitigation and prevention strategies
Safety control and management
System Safety Implementation Guidelines and Standards
Transferring safety knowledge
Metrics for Risk Assessment
Contingency Planning and Occurrence Reporting
Preparedness Activities
Industry specific safety systems (Medical devices, Aerospace, Chemical industry, Nuclear power plants, Public health, Biological Safety)

Micro/nano structures and systems

Complex systems

Real-time systems

Systems scalability

Industrial applications [robotics, production, accounting and billing, e-commerce, etc.]



INSTRUCTION FOR THE AUTHORS

The ICONS 2009 Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press and on-line via IEEE XPlore Digital Library. IEEE will index the papers with major indexes. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to one of the IARIA Journals.

Important deadlines:
Full paper submission October 1, 2008
Authors notification November 5, 2008
Registration and camera ready December 1, 2008

Only .pdf or .doc files will be accepted for paper submission. All received papers will be acknowledged via an automated system.

Final author manuscripts will be 8.5" x 11" (two columns IEEE format), not exceeding 6 pages; max 4 extra pages allowed at additional cost. The formatting instructions can be found on the Instructions page. Helpful information for paper formatting can be found on the here.

Once you receive the notification of paper acceptance, you will be provided by the IEEE CS Press an online author kit with all the steps an author needs to follow to submit the final version. The author kits URL will be included in the letter of acceptance.

Poster Forum

Posters on work-in-progress are welcome. Please submit the contributions following the instructions for the regular submissions using the "Submit a Paper" button and selecting the track/workshop preference as "POSTER : Poster Forum". Contributors are invited to submit up to four-page papers, following the conference deadlines, describing early research and novel skeleton ideas in the areas of the conference topics.

Technical marketing/business/positioning presentations

The conference initiates a series of business, technical marketing, and positioning presentations on the same topics. Speakers must submit a 10-12 slide deck presentations with substantial notes accompanying the slides, in the .ppt format (.pdf-ed). The slide deck will be published in the conference's CD collection, together with the regular papers. Please send your presentations to petre@iaria.org.

Tutorials

Tutorials provide overviews of current high interest topics. They should be about three hours long. Please send your proposals to petre@iaria.org

Panel proposals:

The organizers encourage scientists and industry leaders to organize dedicated panels dealing with controversial and challenging topics and paradigms. Panel moderators are asked to identify their guests and manage that their appropriate talk supports timely reach our deadlines. Moderators must specifically submit an official proposal, indicating their background, panelist names, their affiliation, the topic of the panel, as well as short biographies.

For more information, petre@iaria.org

Workshop proposals

We welcome workshop proposals on issues complementary to the topics of this conference. Your requests should be forwarded to petre@iaria.org.