12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XII)

May 18-20, 2009
Monte Verità, Switzerland

Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, in cooperation with the IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems (TCOS)

Important Dates

* Paper submissions due: January 13, 2009 (hard deadline)
* Notification to authors: March 10, 2009
* Final papers due: April 20, 2009
* Papers available online for attendees: April 27, 2009

Workshop Organizers

Program Chair
Armando Fox, University of California, Berkeley

Program Committee
George Candea, EPFL
Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University and Panasas, Inc.
Rebecca Isaacs, Microsoft Research
Kimberly Keeton, Hewlett-Packard Labs
Eddie Kohler, University of California, Los Angeles
Petros Maniatis, Intel Research Berkeley
Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zürich
Michael L. Scott, University of Rochester
Marvin Theimer, Google, Inc.
Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego
Dan S. Wallach, Rice University

Steering Committee
Galen Hunt, Microsoft Research
Michael B. Jones, Microsoft, Inc.
Margo Seltzer, Harvard University
Ellie Young, USENIX Association

Overview

The practice of computing continues to move at astonishing speed. In the past few years alone, we've seen cloud computing and software as a service, containerized computing, multicore/manycore becoming mainstream, batch processing of petabyte datasets, and biological and statistical approaches to computing and systems. The 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems will bring together innovative practitioners and researchers in computing systems, broadly construed. Continuing the HotOS tradition, participants will present and discuss new ideas about computer systems research and how technological advances and new applications are shaping our computational infrastructure.

We solicit position papers of five or fewer pages that propose new directions of research, advocate non-traditional approaches, report on noteworthy actual experience in an emerging area, or generate lively discussion around an important topic. HotOS takes a broad view of systems, including operating systems, storage, networking, languages and language engineering, security, dependability, and manageability. We are also interested in contributions influenced by other fields such as hardware design, machine learning, control theory, networking, economics, social organizations, and biological or other nonsilicon computing systems.

To ensure a vigorous workshop environment, attendance is limited to about 60 participants who are active in the field. Participants will be invited based on their submissions' originality, technical merit, topical relevance, and likelihood of leading to insightful technical discussions that will influence future systems research. Submissions may not be under consideration for any other venue. In order to promote discussion, the review process will heavily favor submissions that are forward-looking and open-ended, as opposed to those that summarize more mature work on the verge of conference publication. In general, at most two authors per accepted paper will be invited to the workshop.

Submitting a Paper

Position papers must be received by 11:59 p.m. PST on January 13, 2009. This is a hard deadline�??no extensions will be granted.

Submissions must be no longer than 5 pages including figures, tables, and references. Text should be formatted in two columns on 8.5-inch by 11-inch paper using 10 point fonts on 12 point (single-spaced) leading, and 1-inch margins. Author names and affiliations should appear on the title page (reviewing is not blind). Pages should be numbered, and figures and tables should be legible in black and white without requiring magnification. Papers not meeting these criteria will be rejected without review, and no deadline extensions will be granted for reformatting.

Papers must submitted in PDF format via a Web submission form, which will be available here soon.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, and plagiarism constitute dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may, on the recommendation of a program chair, take action against authors who have committed them. In some cases, program committees may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the integrity of papers under consideration. If a violation of these principles is found, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, barring the authors from submitting to or participating in USENIX conferences for a set period, contacting the authors' institutions, and publicizing the details of the case.

Authors uncertain whether their submission meets USENIX's guidelines should contact the program chair, hotos09chair@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. All submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX Web site.