=========================================================================
5TH IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FOG AND EDGE COMPUTING (ICFEC 2021)

10-13 May 2021, Melbourne, Australia

In conjunction with IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2021
URL: https://icfec2021.eeecs.qub.ac.uk
=========================================================================

We are delighted to invite you for the 5th IEEE International Conference on Fog and Edge Computing to be held in Melbourne, Australia. The conference will be held as part of and in conjunction with IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2021, which is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and ACM.


INTRODUCTION
Billions of devices and sensors ranging from user gadgets to more complex systems with sensing and actuating capabilities, such as power grids or vehicles, from the physical world are getting connected to the Internet. However, the need to operate the scale of heterogeneous devices and sensors while being performance-efficient in real-time is challenging. Typically, the data generated by the devices and sensors are transferred to and processed centrally by services hosted on geographically distant clouds. This is untenable given the communication latency incurred and the ingress bandwidth demand.

A new and disruptive paradigm spear-headed by academics and industry experts is taking shape so that applications can leverage resources located at the edge of the network and along the continuum between the cloud and the edge. These edge resources may be geographically or in the network topology be closer to devices and sensors, such as home router, gateways or more substantial micro data centers. Edge resources may be used to offload selected services from the cloud to accelerate an application or host edge-native applications. The paradigm within which the edge is harnessed is referred to as 'Fog/Edge computing'.

The Fog/Edge computing paradigm is expected to improve the agility of service deployments, make use of opportunistic and cheap computing, and leverage the network latency and bandwidth diversities between these resources. Numerous challenges arise when using edge resources, which requires the re-examination of operating systems, virtualization and containers, and middleware techniques for fabric management. Extensions to current programming and storage models are required and new abstractions that will allow developers to design novel applications that can benefit from massively distributed and data-driven systems need to be developed. Addressing security, privacy and trust of the edge resources is of paramount importance while managing the resources and context for mobile, transient and hardware constrained resources. Lastly, emerging domains like autonomous vehicles and machine/deep learning need to be supported over such platforms.


CALL FOR PAPERS
The conference seeks to attract high-quality contributions covering both theory and practice over system software and domain-specific applications related to next-generation distributed systems that use the edge. Some representative topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Data centers and infrastructures for Fog/Edge computing
* Middleware and runtime systems for Fog/Edge infrastructures
* Programming models for Fog/Edge computing
* Storage and data management platforms for Fog/Edge computing
* Scheduling for Fog/Edge infrastructures
* Distributed and federated machine learning on Fog/Edge
* Performance monitoring and metering of Fog/Edge infrastructures
* Legal issues and business aspects of Fog/Edge computing
* Security, privacy, trust and provenance issues in Fog/Edge computing
* Modeling and simulation of Fog/Edge environments
* Novel, latency-sensitive and locality-critical applications of Fog/Edge computing


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
We invite original manuscripts that have neither been published elsewhere nor are under review at a different venue. The manuscripts should be structured as technical papers, written in English. Authors should submit papers electronically in PDF format and may not exceed 8 letter-size pages in length, including all figures, tables and references. Papers should follow the IEEE format template for conference proceedings available at http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines or received after the due date may not be reviewed. All manuscripts will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical strength, significance, quality of presentation, and relevance to the conference attendees.

Papers may be submitted online at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icfec2021


IMPORTANT DATES
* Papers due: 03 January 2021 23:59 AoE
* Author notifications of Acceptance: 08 February 2021
* Camera Ready Paper: 03 March 2021


PUBLICATION
Papers that are accepted for publication may be accepted as REGULAR paper (8 pages) or SHORT papers (5 pages), depending on the reviewer recommendations. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings that will be published through the IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Services.


ORGANIZATION
General Chairs
* Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia
* Yogesh Simmhan, Indian Institute of Science, India

Program Chairs
* Blesson Varghese, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, b.varghese@qub.ac.uk
* Lena Mashayekhy, University of Delaware, USA, mlena@udel.edu

Steering Committee
* Rajkumar Buyya, University of Melbourne, Australia
* Adrien Lebre, INRIA, France
* Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK
* Anthony Simonet, iExec Blockchain Tech, France
* Haiying Shen, University of Virginia, USA
* Massimo Villari, University of Messina, Italy