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Call for Papers

SPECIAL ACADEMIC SESSION ON
* Decentralized and Self-Organizing IT-Infrastructure *
* for Crisis Response and Management *
http://www.quap2p.tu-darmstadt.de/de/events/iscram-2008/
Session ID: INT-03

at
ISCRAM 2008
The 5th International Conference on
Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
Washington, DC, USA
May 4-7, 2008
http://www.iscram.org

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Motivation

Recent crisis like the recent Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and Hurricane
Katrina demand quick first response organization as well as a high
number of participating helpers and organizations. These two
requirements are naturally supported by decentralized and
self-organizing IT-infrastructures. While p2p systems like Groove
achieve an easy way of enabling communication between heterogeneous
first response teams. There are crucial inefficiencies in terms of
network resource utilization, which is a vitally important requirement
in crisis response situations.
There are still numerous open topics necessary to put crisis response
and management software on a solid technical base. Focus for this
special session is the technical management of distributed crisis
response systems. The areas covered by this session are listed below.
Additional contributions concerning crisis response systems that are not
explicitly mentioned but fit into the scope of this session are welcomed
as well.

Research Area

The technical challenges for a successful deployment of a Crisis
Response and Management System can be divided in three main areas.

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Crisis Management Applications
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Decentralized and Self-organizing IT Infrastructure
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TCP/IP-based Communication Layer
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While the base for communication, shown as TCP/IP based communication
layer is crucial for a successful deployment of a Crisis Response
System, the main focus of this special session is the second layer
"Decentralized and Self Organizing IT infrastructure".

The underlying TCP/IP based communication layer becomes increasingly
more a commodity product while intelligent replica placement,
distributed storage, service discovery, access control and context
awareness need to be provided by the second layer. Based on the
available services and infrastructure of the second layer the top layer
provides various user interfaces to the deployed services. While all
three layers are needed for a successful deployment of a Crisis Response
and Management System, the main focus of this session is on the design
of the second layer.

Topics

. Overlay networks specialized for Decentralized Crisis Response and
Management
. Decentralized service discovery
. Distributed information storage and retrieval
. Decentralized and self-organizing mechanisms for replica management
. Decentralized location awareness
. Group membership and access control
. Simulation environments for "Decentralized and Self-Organizing
IT-Infrastructures for Crisis Response and Management"
. Decentralized Crisis Response and Management Systems
. Systems Implications on Policy and Organizational Structures
. Case Studies on "Decentralized and Self-Organizing IT-Infrastructures"


*Important ISCRAM 2008 Dates:*
December 21, 2007: Paper submission deadline
February 10, 2008: Notification of (conditional) acceptance
February 22, 2008: Early registration deadline
March 1, 2008: Final camera-ready paper submission deadline
May 4-7, 2008: ISCRAM 2008


Session Chairs:

. Nicolas Liebau, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
(Nicolas.Liebau@KOM.tu-darmstadt.de)
. Ralf Steinmetz, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
(Ralf.Steinmetz@KOM.tu-darmstadt.de)
. Dirk Bradler, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
(bradler@tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de)
. Jussi Kangasharju, University of Helsinki, Finland
(Jussi.Kangasharju@cs.helsinki.fi)


Type of contribution:
. Academic Session: We invite researchers from academia or research labs
to present their research or research-in-progress papers. Prospective
presenters submit a regular research (or research-in-progress) paper.


Important Notice:
. All submissions must be formatted according to the ISCRAM 2008
formatting guidelines. Templates and instructions are published on
www.iscram.org.
. All submissions must be submitted through the ISCRAM 2008 conference
paper submission web page at www.conftool.com/iscram2008. Instructions
for the ConfTool system can be found on www.iscram.org.
. All papers and presentations will go through a double-blind review
process, leading to a decision of (conditional) acceptance or rejection.
. Accepted papers will be included in the ISCRAM 2008 program and
published in the official proceedings if and only if
(1) the paper is formatted according to the instructions,
(2) the authors sign the copyright transfer form and
(3) one of the authors registers for the conference and pays the
registration fee before the cut-off date for early registration.
. Authors who have multiple papers accepted can only register for and
present one paper at the conference; co-authors need to register
separately.


About ISCRAM:
The ISCRAM Community is a worldwide community of researchers, scholars,
teachers, students, practitioners and policy makers interested or
actively involved in the subject of Information Systems for Crisis
Response and Management. At its annual international conference
alternating between the US and Europe, the ISCRAM Community gathers to
present and discuss the latest research and developments in this growing
area during an interactive and stimulating 3 day program. The ISCRAM
Community also organizes an International Summer School for PhD students
and ISCRAM-CHINA, an annual conference for ISCRAM research in China. All
information on ISCRAM can be found at http://www.iscram.org
ISCRAM 2008 will be held from 4-7 May at the George Washington
University (GWU) located in Washington, DC, USA. The conference will be
hosted by GWU's Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management
(ICDRM). All details on this conference will be made available via the
ISCRAM website mentioned above.