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SAC 2018

For the past thirty years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2018 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), and will be held in Pau, France.

Call for papers (download)

Service-Oriented Programming (SOP) is quickly changing our vision of software development, bringing a paradigmatic shift in the methodologies followed by programmers when designing and implementing distributed systems. SOP originally triggered a radical transformation of the Web, from being a means of presenting information to a wide spectrum of people to becoming a computational fabric. In such fabric, loosely-coupled services publish their interfaces and, through them, discover and interact with each other abstracting from their internal implementations. While this transformation still continues today, it has also already generated other shifts in how programmers deal with resource handling (Cloud Computing) and the scalability of software architectures from the very small to the very large (Microservices). Research on SOP is giving strong impetus to the development of new technologies and tools for creating and deploying distributed software. In the context of this modern paradigm we have to cope with an old challenge, like in the early days of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) when consistency in the programming model definition was not achieved until the definition of key features like encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, together with proper design methodologies. The complex scenario of SOP needs to be clarified on many aspects, both from the engineering and from the foundational points of view.

From the engineering point of view, there are open issues at many levels. Among others, at the system design level, both traditional approaches based on UML and approaches taking inspiration from business process modelling, e.g. BPMN, are used. At the composition level, orchestration and choreography are continuouslsy improved both formally and practically, with an evident need for their integration in the development process. At the description and discovery level there are two separate communities pushing respectively the semantic approach (ontologies, OWL, ...) and the syntactic one like WSDL. In particular, the role of discovery engines and protocols is not clear. In this respect we still lack adopted standards: UDDI looked to be a good candidate, but it is no longer pushed by the main corporations, and its wide adoption seems difficult. Furthermore, a recent implementation platform, the so-called REST services, is emerging and competing with classic Web Services. Finally, features like Quality of Service, security and dependability need to be taken seriously into account, and this investigation should lead to standard proposals.

From the foundational point of view, researchers have discussed widely in the last years, and many attempts to use formal methods for specification and verification in this setting have been made. Session correlation, service types, contract theories and communication patterns are only a few examples of the aspects that have been investigated. Moreover, several formal models based upon automata, Petri nets and algebraic approaches have been developed. However, most of these approaches concentrate only on a few features of Service-Oriented Systems in isolation, and a comprehensive approach is still far from being achieved. Our track aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners having the common objective of transforming SOP into a mature discipline with both solid scientific foundations and mature software engineering development methodologies supported by dedicated tools. In particular, we will encourage works and discussions about what SOP still needs in order to achieve its original goal.

Major topics of interest will include:
  • Formal methods for Service-Oriented Computing
  • Notations, models, and standards for Service-Oriented Computing
  • Tools and Middlewares for Service-Oriented Development
  • Service-Oriented Programming Languages
  • Service-Oriented Programming in dynamic Open Service Ecosystems
  • Service Choreographies and Protocol-Driven Service Development
  • Service Interfaces and Communication Technologies (e.g., REST)
  • Microservices and Scalable Service-Oriented Computing
  • Engineering methodologies and Patterns for Service-Oriented Software
  • Static Analysis and Testing of Service-Oriented applications
  • Adaptability, Dependability, and Fault handling in Service Systems
  • Security in Service-Oriented Architectures
  • Quality of Service and Performance Analysis
  • Industrial deployment of tools and methodologies, case studies
  • Service application case studies
  • Trust and Services
  • Sustainability and Services, Green Computing
  • Cloud Computing and Services
  • Services and Big Data
  • IoT and Cloud-based Services

Important Dates

  • September 25, 2017 (EXTENDED): Submission of regular papers and SRC research abstracts
  • November 17, 2017: Notification of paper and SRC abstracts acceptance/rejection
  • December 9, 2017: Camera-ready copies of accepted papers/SRC abstracts
  • December 15, 2017: Author registration due date

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished papers. Submission of the same paper to multiple tracks is not allowed. Peer groups with expertise in the track focus area will double-blindly review submissions. This means that authors must omit their names and institutions from the title page, they should refer to their other work in the third person and omit acknowledgements that could reveal their identity or affiliation. The purpose is to avoid any bias based on authors' identity characteristics, such as gender, seniority, or nationality, in the review process. Our goal is to facilitate an unbiased approach to reviewing by supporting reviewers' access to works that do not carry obvious references to the authors' identities. Anonymization should not be a heavy burden for authors, and should not make papers weaker or more difficult to review. Advertising the paper on alternate forums (e.g., on a personal web-page, pre-print archive, email, talks, discussions with colleagues) is permitted, and authors will not be penalized by for such advertisement. Papers not satisfying this constraint will be automatically rejected.

Accepted papers will be published in the annual conference proceedings. SOAP track chairs will not submit to the track. Submissions from SOAP PC members and from PC members and track chairs of other SAC tracks are welcome. Submission guidelines can be found on the SAC 2018 website. Prospective papers should be submitted to the track using the provided automated submission system. See the SAC site for the page constraints. For each accepted paper, an author or a proxy attending SAC MUST present the paper. This is a requirement for the paper to be included in the ACM/IEEE digital library.

Paper registration is required, allowing the inclusion of the papers, posters, or SRC abstracts in the conference proceedings. An author or a proxy attending SAC MUST present the paper. This is a requirement for the presented work to be included in the ACM/IEEE digital library. No-show of registered papers, posters, and SRC abstracts will result in excluding them from the ACM/IEEE digital library.

Please submit your contribution via SAC 2018 submission site.

Special Issue

We plan a special issue of a top-level journal for which we will invite the best papers.

Student Research Competition Program

As before, SAC 2018 organizes a Student Research Competition (SRC) Program to provide graduate students the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with researchers and practitioners in their areas of interest. For guidelines and information about the SRC program: www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2018/src_program.html.

Submission of research abstracts to the SRC program should be in electronic form via SAC 2018 SRC papers submission site.
Submission of the same abstract to multiple tracks is not allowed. All research abstract submissions will be reviewed by researchers and practitioners with expertise in the track focus area to which they are submitted. Authors of selected abstracts will have the opportunity to give poster presentations of their work and compete for three top-winning places. The Student Research Competition committee will evaluate and select First-, Second-, and Third- place winners. The winners will receive cash awards and SIGAPP recognition certificates during the conference banquet. Authors of selected abstracts are eligible to apply to the SIGAPP Student Travel Award program for support.

Program Committee

  • Nazareno Aguirre (Universidad de Río Cuarto, AR)
  • Farhad Arbab (Leiden University and CWI, Amsterdam, NL)
  • Luís Barbosa (University of Minho, Braga, PT)
  • Maurice ter Beek (ISTI-CNR, IT)
  • Antonio Bucchiarone (FBK, Trento, IT)
  • Romain Demangeon (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, FR)
  • Shuiguang Deng (Zhejiang University, PRC)
  • Schahram Dustdar (Vienna University of Technology, AT)
  • Gian Luigi Ferrari (Università di Pisa, IT)
  • José Fiadeiro (Royal Holloway University of London, UK)
  • Saverio Giallorenzo (University of Bologna, IT)
  • Ross Horne (Nanyang Technological University, SG)
  • Vasileios Koutavas (Trinity College Dublin, IR)
  • Alberto Lluch Lafuente (Technical University of Denmark, DK)
  • Hernán Melgratti (University of Buenos Aires, AR)
  • Alberto Núñez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, SP)
  • Jorge A. Perez (University of Groningen, NL)
  • Gustavo Petri (Purdue University, USA)
  • António Ravara (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, PT)
  • Victor Rivera (Innopolis University, RU)
  • Alceste Scalas (Imperial College London, UK)
  • Nikolay Shilov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, RU)
  • Hugo Torres Vieira (IMT Lucca, IT)
  • Farouk Toumani (Université Blaise Pascal, FR)
  • Emilio Tuosto (University of Leicester, UK)
  • Yuhong Yan (Concordia University, CA)
  • Gianluigi Zavattaro (University of Bologna, IT)
  • Roberto Zunino (University of Trento, IT)

Track Chairs

Publicity Chair

  • Stefano Lande
    lande @ unica.it
    Università di Cagliari, Italy

Steering Committee

  • Claudio Guidi, italianaSoftware, Italy
  • Ivan Lanese, University of Bologna, Italy and INRIA, France
  • Manuel Mazzara, Innopolis University, Russia
  • Fabrizio Montesi, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark