Melbourne

Middleware 2006, Melbourne, Australia

The 5th Workshop on
Adaptive and Reflective Middleware

(ARM2006)

Monday November 27, 2006
Melbourne, Australia
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Overview

It is now widely acknowledged that middleware systems of the future must flexibly adapt to the increasing heterogeneity of devices and access networks, and deal with dynamic changes at different levels of the system architecture. The first workshops in this series (RMW00, RMW03, RMW04, ARM05) explored reflective techniques to "open up" the middleware implementation, allowing programmers to better configure middleware services for each application. In his Middleware 2003 keynote, Marc Fleury recognized reflective middleware as a strong influence on the commercially successful JBoss platform. The name of the workshop was changed in 2005 to adaptive and reflective middleware in recognition of the importance of self-adaptivity where is too low or costly to rely on programmers. Contributors to these workshops have deepened our understanding of middleware design through varied applications of adaptive and reflective middleware techniques

In the 2006 incarnation of ARM, we want to broaden the scope of the workshop still further. This broadening will take place on three fronts.
  1. We will consider a broader range of techniques that expand current work on software componentization and design patterns in support of adaptation - prime examples are: software architecture; design patterns;  aspect orientation;  and control theory. 
  2. We want to recognize the current strong trends towards decentralized and diverse environments, including: peer-to-peer platforms; network-centric systems; grid computing; sensor networks; and pervasive and mobile applications.  This essentially implies considering domain-specific adaptation approaches (e.g. generalized fault-tolerance in peer-to-peer platforms). 
  3. We recognize that developing adaptive, flexible and interoperable middleware for heterogeneous execution environments requires us to focus more on the nuances of system layers other than the middleware 'layer' itself (e.g. devices, OSs, networks, applications), and on possible architectural configurations under which the next generation of applications must execute.    

Goal and Contributions

Following the success of the past workshops in this series, ARM2006 aims at providing researchers with a leading edge view on the state of the art in adaptive and reflective middleware, and with the challenging problems that remain unsolved.

The goal is to gather active researchers in this important field, so as to gain insight on their experiences and the new approaches being proposed. Our ambition in this incarnation is to also bring together a wider group of researchers that are involved in designing adaptive systems at different system layers including architectural, OS and network layers. We believe that a forum that allows experts in these communities to interact with  each other will support a more holistic approach to future research in adaptive and reflective systems. The workshop should provide an exciting environment in which to leverage cooperation among researchers, contributing to the development of middleware technology.

Workshop Format

The workshop will be organized as a series of sessions, each devoted to the presentation of papers belonging to a common domain. Each session will end with a mini-panel between the presenters, led by the session chair or a pre-selected devil's advocate. In past years this format has been found to lead to lively and productive discussions.

The workshop will include a special session for the presentation of posters and demos of ongoing research efforts and software prototypes.

The workshop will conclude with a panel, moderated by one of the organizers, to discuss open issues and future trends in the field, with the aim of wrapping up the overall contributions of the event.

Submission Guidelines

Attendance to the workshop is based on the submission of a position paper, poster or demo. In addition, other participants may be invited by the organizing committee.
Position papers should not exceed 6 pages of text on letter/A4 paper in ACM format without page numbers. Document templates for most popular document processing tools can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Submissions should be accompanied with a 2-page abstract.

Papers and abstracts should be emailed to <arm06@ics.uci.edu> with subject line clearly identifying "ARM2006 submission" before submission deadline. All papers and abstracts should be in either PS or PDF format.

All workshop papers will be published via ACM's Digital Library as part of the "ACM International Conference Proceeding Series" (AICPS). A few selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to IEEE Distributed Systems Online.

Topics of interest to this workshop include, but not limit to the following:

  • Design and performance of adaptive and/or reflective middleware platforms.
  • Application of adaptive and reflective middleware techniques to achieve reconfigurability and/or adaptability.
  • Application of techniques to achieve separation of concerns.
  • Design of Meta Object Protocols (MOP) for adaptive and reflective middleware.
  • Cross-layer interactions and adaptation mechanisms including network, OS and device level techniques.
  • Adaptation and reflection in heterogeneous execution paradigms  -- P2P networks, network-centric computing.
  • Incorporation of non-functional properties such as real-time, fault-tolerance, security, etc. into middleware.
  • Experiences with adaptive and reflective technologies in specific application domains e.g., sensor networks, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, mobile computing, etc.
  • Fundamental developments in the theory and practice of reflection, as it relates to middleware.
  • Experience with existing mechanisms, such as CORBA portable interceptors, or the OMG Meta-Object Facility.
  • Consideration of alternative techniques for dynamic configuration and/or reconfiguration.
  • Examination of how complementary techniques, such as aspect-oriented programming, solve problems in the design, implementation and use of adaptive and reflective middleware.
  • Techniques to improve performance and/or scalability of adaptive and reflective techniques.
  • Approaches to maintain the integrity of adaptive and reflective technologies.
  • Tools support for adaptive and reflective middleware such as, developing, deploying, debugging and modeling ARM applications.
  • Incorporation of software development techniques, such as design patterns, component frameworks and software architectures.
  • Design and programming abstractions to manage the complexity of reflective and adaptive mechanisms.
  • Hardware reconfigurability.
  • Ad-hoc network in heterogeneous execution paradigms.

Important Dates

Submission Due has been extended!
Paper and abstract submission (extended) August 8th, 2006
Acceptance notification September 22th, 2006
Camera-ready papers due October 14th, 2006
Workshop November 27th, 2006


Program Chairs

Geoff Coulson Lancaster University, UK
Nalini Venkatasubramanian University of California at Irvine, USA

Publicity Chair

Angelo Corsaro Selex SI, Italy


Poster/Demo Chair

Renato Cerqueira PUC-Rio, Brazil

Publications Chair

Fábio Costa Federal University of Goiás, Brazil

Technical Program Committee

Gul Agha University of Illinois at U. Champaign, USA
Anders Andersen University of Tromso, Norway
Roberto Baldoni Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy
Gordon Blair Lancaster University, UK
Jean-Pierre Briot Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, France
Rajkumar Buyya University of Melbourne, Australia
Edward Curry National University of Ireland, Ireland
Nikil Dutt University of California, Irvine, USA
Frank Eliassen University of Oslo, Norway
Alessandro Garcia Lancaster University, UK
Christopher Gill Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Rajesh Gupta University of California, San Diego, USA
Jadwiga Indulska University of Queensland, Australia
Hans Arno Jabobsen University of Toronto, Canada
Fabio Kon University of São Paulo, Brazil
Michael Kounavis Intel Research and Development
Stefano Russo Federico II University of Naples, Italy
Corrado Santoro Universita' di Catania, Italy
Richard Staehli Northern Natural Gas, Nebraska, USA
Carolyn Talcott SRI International, USA
Sandeep Uttamchandani IBM Almaden Research Center, USA
Steve Vinoski IONA Technologies, USA
Nanbor Wang Tech-X Corporation, USA

Organizing Committee

Renato Cerqueira PUC-Rio, Brazil
Angelo Corsaro Selex SI, Italy
Fábio Costa Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
Geoff Coulson Lancaster University, UK
Richard Staehli Northern Natural Gas, Nebraska, USA
Nalini Venkatasubramanian University of California at Irvine, USA
Nanbor Wang Tech-X Corporation, USA

Contact Info: <arm06@ics.uci.edu>