About

Workshop Scope

Currently available middleware systems are required to support various levels of flexibility in order to adapt and tailor their behavior and properties to the increasing dynamism of new models of computation and new classes of applications. These usually include:

Networked applications that must operate under resource constraints and intermittent network connections,
Cyber-physical systems with a tight integration among computation, physical devices and interaction with the physical world,
Open systems with long operation lives able to accept new components, remove existing components, and adapt to new situations,
Next generation networked interactive applications driven by the availability of devices such as smart phones and tablets,
New degrees of high performance computing, such as the goal of exa-scale computing systems,
On-demand Assembled Applications to meet speciﬁc needs, from various and heterogeneous components, requiring infrastructure support to that enable the assemblage of trusted (reliable, secure. . . ) systems given high-level policies with goals and constraints.

Applying reﬂective techniques to middleware, and related software platforms for interoperability, one-to-many deployment, and adaptability, in order to ”open up” their implementation, was explored in the previous workshops in this series [1–12] and proved particularly successful and inﬂuential. Reﬂection by itself is today considered a baseline, yet it is insuﬃcient to deliver the ﬂexibility demanded by today’s ever diversifying middleware environments, requiring higher and higher degrees of adaptability and resilience. The 13th Workshop on Adaptive and Reﬂective Middleware aims to follow on the success of previous editions by providing researchers with a forum to address this technological gap and explore how reﬂective approaches can be combined with complementary perspectives to support the complete life-cycle of highly adaptive middleware platforms. As in the previous editions, the traditional scope of the workshop will be expanded to the following aspects:

broader range of techniques that expand current work on software componentization and design patterns in support of adaptation, examples being: software architecture; design patterns; aspect orientation; control theory;
current strong trends towards decentralized and diverse environments, including: cloud computing, peer-to-peer platforms; network-centric systems; grid computing; sensor networks, pervasive and mobile applications, possibly backed up by cloud-like infrastructures. In essence, this implies considering domain-speciﬁc adaptation approaches (e.g., generalized fault-tolerance in peer-to-peer platforms differs from tighter cloud data center architecture);
investigate how developing adaptive, ﬂexible and interoperable middleware for heterogeneous execution environments requires practitioners to adopt a multi-level perspective by extending one’s focus beyond ’pure’ middleware, and encompassing the remaining system ’layers’ (e.g., devices, OSs, virtualization technology, networks, applications); Reflection and adaptability may encompass the entire execution stack.
explore the connections with other techniques and research ﬁelds that are related to dynamic adaptation, such as autonomic computing, self-* systems, context-aware computing, and location-based services.

Relevance and Goals

Following the success of the past workshops in this series [1–12], ARM 2014 aims at providing researchers with a leading edge view on the state of the art in reﬂective and adaptive middleware, and on 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. This edition follows the path initiated in the 2006 edition, by bringing together a wider group of researchers that are involved in designing and reusing adaptive systems at diﬀerent system layers, including architectural, OS, virtualization technology, and network layers, as well as using diﬀerent techniques that are complementary to reﬂection. The past four editions led us to 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.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Design and performance of adaptive and/or reﬂective middleware platforms;
Experiences with adaptive and reﬂective technologies in speciﬁc domains (e.g., sensor networks, ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile computing, cloud/grid computing, P2P, Systems-of-Systems, etc.);
Cross-layer interactions and adaptation mechanisms including network, OS, VM & device level techniques;
Adaptation and reﬂection in heterogeneous execution paradigms (e.g., P2P networks, network-centric computing);
Application of adaptive and reﬂective middleware techniques to achieve: reconﬁgurability and/or adaptability and/or separation of concerns; reuse and reification of adaptation techniques and strategies;
Incorporating non-functional properties into middleware: realtime, fault-tolerance, security, trust, privacy…;
Fundamental developments in the theory and practice of reﬂection, adaptation and control, as it relates to middleware and its interaction with other layers;
Techniques to improve performance and/or scalability of adaptive and reﬂective techniques;
Evaluation methodologies for adaptive and reﬂective middleware; guidelines, testbeds and benchmarks;
Approaches to maintain the integrity of adaptive and reﬂective technologies; convergence of adaptation.
Tool support for adaptive and reﬂective middleware;’
Design and programming abstractions to manage the complexity of adaptive and reﬂective mechanisms;
Software engineering methodologies for the design and development of adaptive middleware;
Methods for reasoning and storing knowledge about services provided by adaptive/reﬂective middleware;
The role of techniques such as learning in the design of long-lived adaptive middleware;
Methods for asynchronous, distributed control, coordination/cooperation among components providing middleware services.
Metrics on properties such as cost-of-adaptation, quality-of-adaptation, consistency-of-adaptation, yields

Submissions and Important dates

See Call for Papers for details:

September 13, 2014 – Paper Submission (Extended!)
October 6, 2014 – Notification of Acceptance
October 14, 2014 – Camera-ready paper due

Organization

The workshop is to be organized by two members of the ARM community with the knowing of the ARM Steering Committee.

Organizing Committee:

Fábio M. Costa (chair/main contact) – Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
Anders Andersen (chair) – UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Steering Committee:

Gordon Blair – Lancaster University, UK
Renato Cerqueira – PUC-Rio, Brazil
Fábio M. Costa – Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
Paulo Ferreira – INESC-ID, Portugal
Fabio Kon – University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Nalini Venkatasubramanian – University of California at Irvine, USA

Program Committee

Alexandre Sztajnberg, UERJ, Brazil
Anders Andersen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Carolyn Talcott, SRI International, USA
Didier Donsez, Université Joseph Fourier – Grenoble 1, France
Edward Curry, NUI Galway, Ireland
Fábio Costa, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
Fabio Kon, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Gang Huang, Peking University, China
Geoff Coulson, Lancaster University, UK
Gordon Blair, Lancaster University, UK
Ian Wakeman, University of Sussex, UK
Luís Veiga, INESC-ID, Portugal
Markus Endler, PUC-Rio, Brazil
Nalini Venkatasubramanian, University of California at Irvine, USA
Nikolaos Georgantas, INRIA, France
Paolo Bellavista, University of Bologna, Italy
Paulo Ferreira, INESC-ID, Portugal
Philippe Merle, INRIA, France
Renato Cerqueira, IBM Research, Brazil
Richard Schantz, BBN Technologies, USA
Romain Rouvoy, University Lille 1 and INRIA, France
Sonia Ben Mokhtar, CNRS, France
Thomas Ledoux, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France
Yérom-David Bromberg, University of Bordeaux 1, France

Past Editions

MW 2000. Workshop on Reflective Middleware (RM2000). http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/rm2000
MW 2003. The 2nd Workshop on Reflective Middleware (RM’03). http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~corsaro/RM2003
MW 2004. The 3rd Workshop on Reflective Middleware (RM’04). http://www.txcorp.com/~nanbor/RM2004
MW 2005. The 4th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’05). http://www.txcorp.com/~nanbor/ARM2005
MW 2006. The 5th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’06). http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arm06
MW 2007. The 6th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’07). http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arm
MW 2008. The 7th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’08). http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ computing/arm2008
MW 2009. The 8th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’09). http://middleware2009.cs.uiuc.edu
MW 2010. The 9th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’10). http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arm2010
MW 2011. The 10th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’11). http://arm11.lifl.fr/
MW 2012. The 11th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’12). http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~pjpf/arm2012/arm-2012.html/
MW 2013. The 12th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM’13). http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~pjpf/arm2013/arm-2013.html

The 13th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM 2014)

In conjunction with ACM/IFIP/USENIX ACM International Middleware Conference 2014, Bordeaux, France, December 8-12 2014