Call for Papers

Embracing Global Computing in Emerging Economies
26-28 February 2015, Almaty, Kazakhstan
http://emerging.kbtu.kz

This is a British Council funded workshop for promoting joint research in computer science between Kazakhstan and United Kingdom. Travel grants, worth up to £1000, are available for researchers having complete their PhD within the past 10 years and PhD students, who are based in either United Kingdom or in Kazakhstan. The workshop features post-proceeding in Springer's CCIS series, and four invited speakers from UK and Russia.

Background:
Modern computing no longer takes place on a personal machine. Businesses and private users alike are increasingly entrusting their data to Cloud providers that run global networks of datacenters. These datacenters provide the illusion of infinite resources available on demand at minimal cost. Furthermore, Cloud providers absorb the risk of up front investment in an IT infrastructure that is resilient to data loss, service outage, and fluctuation in demand. Without a global network of datacenters, few businesses would be able to deliver services that perform equally well in London, San Francisco and Singapore.

Businesses in countries like Kazakhstan risk missing out on the competitive edge given by tapping into this global network of datacenters. The nearest datacenters to Almaty for major Cloud providers, such as Amazon, are in Beijing and Frankfurt. This results in a visible impact on the performance of service and reduced availability causing loss of customers.

To avoid emerging economies like Kazakhstan lagging behind in the push toward global computing, several problems need to be addressed, not limited to the following:
- How do we address and overcome legal restrictions on where data from public bodies are held? What are the obstacles to embracing Open Data?
- How do we design systems that are resilient to natural disasters and extreme weather? Can we cost effectively ensure that if a datacenter is destroyed in an earthquake, then no data will be lost or become unavailable?
- How can smaller local Cloud providers join a global network of Cloud providers, sometimes called the Intercloud? Can Cloud brokers make accessing computing resources easier for adopters?
- How do we model services that run on a global network of datacenters. How do the foundational models and semantics of systems change to accurately reflect reality?
- How do we design verification tools for checking that both the infrastructure inside datacenters and services running across datacenters are correct? Can we test systems running at small scale, to see how they would behave at a big scale?
- How do we deliver services to regions with almost no high bandwidth channels. Can we optimise remote sessions such that a minimal amount of information is transmitted over the expensive wide-area network.
- How do we quantify the economic risk factors that are managed by different Cloud providers? How do we model different work loads that a system may be faced with.
- How can emerging economies, such as Kazakhstan, take the lead in innovation in global computing, where we see projects through from foundational results to concrete applications.

We welcome technical papers addressing related topics in computer science. We welcome: bold foundational non-incremental developments; inter-disciplinary papers covering economic and environmental issues; systems papers that describe and evaluate related systems; and, papers on techniques, tools and methodologies.

Submissions:
Submissions should be a paper of up to 10 pages prepared according to Springer's guidelines for the Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Papers should be submitted through EasyChair at the following address:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=egc20150

Papers will receive three reviews. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings distributed at the event. Submission for the post-proceedings will be one month after the workshop, giving participants time to revise their work based on feedback. The full papers for the post-proceeding will be reviewed again, to ensure that improvements have been made. Subject to approval, the post-proceedings would be published in Springer's Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series.

We encourage papers where results are formally stated and proven and draw on fundamental results in computer science. The best formally stated papers will be invited for a special edition of Scientific Annals of Computer Science (SACS). SACS is indexed by Scopus and DBLP.

Dates:
Submission of papers (extended abstract): 18 January 2015, 23:59 Hawaii time
Notification: 1 February 2015
Workshop dates: 26-28 February 2015
Post-proceedings (full paper): 1 April 2015

Venue:
The workshop will be held in Kazakh-British Technical University, Tole Bi 59, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Local Organisers (Kazakhstan):
Ross Horne, Kazakh-British Technical University
Ken Charman, Kazakh-British Technical University

British Coordinators (United Kingdom):
Vladimiro Sassone, University of Southampton
Toby Wilkinson, University of Southampton

Invited Speakers:
Nikolay Shilov, A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics, Novosibirsk;
and Nazarbayev University, Astana
Yehia Elkhatib, Lancaster University, UK
Gareth Tyson, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Sergey Khalyapin, Manager of Systems Engineers, Citrix, Russia

Program Committee:
Assel Akzhalova, Kazakh-British Technical University
Bogdan Aman, Romanian Academy of Sciences
Gabrielle Anderson, University College London
Lyazzat Atytmayeva, Kazakh-British Technical University
Bektur Baizhanov, Kazakh Academy of Sciences
Timur Bakibayev, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
Kenes Beketayev, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Gabriel Ciobanu, Newcastle University
Anuar Dussembaev, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
Yehia Elkhatib, Lancaster University
Mahmud Hassan, International IT University
Ross Horne, Kazakh-British Technical University
Anatoly Kornev, Kazakh-British Technical University
Ramesh Kini, Kazakh-British Technical University
Kevin Lano, Kings College London
Sofoklis Makridis, University of Western Macedonia
Denis Nicole, University of Southampton
Shekoufeh Rahimi, Kings College London
Alexander Romanovsky, Newcastle University
Asieh Salehi, University of Southampton
Vladimiro Sassone, University of Southampton
Nikolay Shilov, Nazarbayev University
Asqar Shotqara, Kazakh-British Technical University
Timur Umarov, Kazakh-British Technical University
Viktor Verbovskiy, Suleyman Demirel University
Toby Wilkinson, University of Southampton

For queries contact: egc15@easychair.org