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GECON 2021 Call for Papers - Extended Deadline
18th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds,
Systems & Services
http://2021.gecon-conference.org
21-23. September 2021, Online

Springer LNCS Proceedings
Fast Tracks for several Journals in Computer Systems and E-Commerce
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Third Call for full papers (12 pages), short papers (8 pages), and
new-idea papers (4 pages + poster presentation), which will be included
in the proceedings.

Announcement of confirmed workshops, special topic sessions, and
tutorials (please see below for details):
- Energy Efficiency Methodologies in Cloud Computing
- Law & Computer Science
- Climate Change & Computer Science
- Trustworthy Services, Information Exchange and Content Handling
in the Context of Blockchain
- Regulation Reformation for Balancing Blockchain Innovation

GECON 2021 builds upon the very successful tradition of the
conference previous editions (http://www.gecon-conference.org)
since 2003. GECON solicits contributions that are
interdisciplinary, combining business and economic aspects
with engineering and computer science related themes.

The conference will be held online.

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/ Important Deadlines /
======================
The submission deadlines have been extended to give more
time to prepare the papers:

- Paper abstract submission deadline: June 14th, 2021
- Full Paper and Short Paper (Work-in-Progress) submission deadline: June 21st, 2021
- New-Idea Paper Submission deadline: July 12th, 2021

- Notification of acceptance of submissions: July 19th, 2021
- Camera Ready deadline: July 26th, 2021

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/ Topics of Interest /
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As a global market for infrastructures, platforms, and
software services emerge, the need to understand and deal with
its implications and its interdisciplinary challenges is
quickly growing. To address this, GECON encourages the
submission of papers, which combine at least one
economic/legal area and one technologic area. GECON list of
areas includes but is not limited to:

-Economics-
Trustworthiness of services
Ecosystem economics
Incentive design, strategic behavior & game theory
Market mechanisms, auctions models, and bidding languages
Economic efficiency
Techno-economic analysis and modelling
Pricing schemes and revenue models
Metering, accounting, and billing
Cost-benefit analysis
Automated trading and bidding support tools
Trust, reputation, security, and risk management
Performance monitoring, optimization, and prediction
Energy efficiency
Sustainability
Business models and strategies
Decision support
Ecosystems

-Law and Legal Aspects-
Standardization, interoperability, and legal aspects
Service level Agreements (SLAs)
Negotiation, monitoring, and enforcement
Governance of ecosystems
Privacy

-Clouds, Grids, Systems and Services-
IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and Federation of resources
Vertical scaling, burstable computing, vertical elasticity
Resource management: allocation, sharing, and scheduling
Capacity planning
Virtualization and containers
Service science, management and engineering (SSME)
Software engineering
Security

-Applications and Technologies Transforming the Economy-
Smart grids, smart cities, and smart buildings
Energy-aware infrastructures and services
Fog, edge, osmosis computing
Micro-services, serverless computing
Internet-of-Things
Blockchains
Community networks
Social networks
Social computing
Big data
Reports on industry test-beds and operational markets
Data stream ingestion and complex event processing
Open source

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/ Publication and Submission Guidelines for Papers /
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Original full papers and short papers (work-in-progress papers),
which are not currently under review at another conference, will
be considered. Manuscripts will be reviewed based on technical
merit, originality, and relevance. Past acceptance rates have
been around 30 per cent in recent years.

All submissions shall be submitted using the Springer LNCS
format. Submitted full papers should not exceed 12 pages and
WIP papers should not exceed 8 pages (including references
and appendices). New-idea papers should be exactly 4 pages.
For further details, please visit the GECON 2021 web page.

Paper submissions are managed through EasyChair at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gecon2021.

The proceedings will be published by Springer LNCS.

Extended versions of up to 10 accepted papers in the Computer
Science field will be invited for publication in a special issue in
the:
- Elsevier Journal of Future Generation Computing Systems.
For papers targeting mainly business and economic aspects,
special issues in:
- Springer Electronic Markets Journal,
- Elsevier Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, or
- Springer Electronic Commerce Research
with up to 15 papers are foreseen.

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/ New-Idea Paper (Poster) Submissions /
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New-idea papers provide a unique opportunity for PhD students
and young researchers to present their new ideas, and senior
researchers to present their starting activities, current progress,
or novel approaches of their works and to receive constructive
feedback from their peers as well as experts in the field (including
academics and practitioners) at the GECON conference.

New-Idea papers will comprise a 4-page paper, which will be
Included in the proceedings) and a poster presentation.

Authors of accepted full papers and short papers
(work-in-progress papers) are also welcome to present their
work in poster sessions, giving them a higher visibility than only
giving a talk.

Posters will be organized and presented throughout the
conference using gather.town, allowing for many discussions
with participants and a highly interactive conference.

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/ Accepted Tutorial: “Energy Efficiency
Methodologies in Cloud Computing” (Karim Djemame) /
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Computer systems have faced significant power consumption
challenges over the past 20 years. The dual challenge of both
power and performance has in recent years shifted from the
devices and circuits level, to their current position as first-order
constraints for system architects and software developers. A
common theme is the need for low-power computing systems
that are fully interconnected, self-aware, context-aware and
self-optimising within application boundaries.

The tutorial presents a number of energy efficiency methodologies
and their use in domains such as cloud computing, which makes
up a large proportion of the total ICT energy consumption. Cloud
computing providers resort to a variety of techniques to improve
energy consumption at each level of the cloud computing stack:
application design, programming model, middleware, virtualisation,
hardware. Therefore, research on energy efficiency in cloud
computing has attracted considerable attention and has focused
on many aspects including ICT equipment (servers, networks) as
well as software solutions running on top of ICT equipment (cloud
management system domain for managing the cloud infrastructure).

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/ Accepted Special Topic Session: Law & Computer Science /
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As Law and Computer science develop, they pose each other
new challenges. These challenges are expressed in questions
such as: Where must computer scientists stretch their abilities
to provide law with adequate solutions? What legal developments
are required to deal with new computer science achievements?

In this panel, hosted by Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda of the CRI
institute at the University of Haifa, we will hear answers from:
* Niva Elkin-Koren, of Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law,
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
* Supreeth Shastri, of the University of Iowa

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/ Accepted Special Topic Session: Climate Change and Computer Science /
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The purpose of this special session is to promote the focus of research
on climate change challenges related to computer science. As the GECON
community comprises multi-disciplinary skills for addressing these
challenges, we are optimistic that this special session will bring highly
useful ideas and results. Special session topics include but are not limited
to technology, cost, benefit, and society aspects of:
* Digital support to pandemic control policies
* Digital support to climate change prevention
* Fintech platforms to facilitate SME credit and supporting small businesses
through big data, blockchain finance, supply chain finance
* Analytical and simulation capabilities of models and data involved in
climate research: resource allocation systems, health diffusion, population
dynamics, individual behavior.
* Ecosystem of active and reactive involvement of citizens and other actors.
* Collaborative tools for data, models, methods, and resources sharing to
support decision making.
* Recommender systems

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/ Accepted Workshop: Trustworthy Services, Information Exchange
and Content Handling in the Context of Blockchain /
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Blockchain is by nature a decentralized and trustless platform, i.e., only
a minimum level of trust is required regarding executing the transactions
properly which is achieved by means of a consensus mechanism and an
economic game that incentivizes actors to comply with the rules defined
by the protocol. At the same time, there are no guarantees on service
quality or seller behavior in a service exchange. For example, the service
purchased may be of lower quality than expected, and the trustworthiness
or provenance of data employed can be questionable. To this end, this
workshop will address challenges, problems, and solutions in this context.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
* Blockchain e-markets
* Trustworthy Smart Oracles
* Smart Contracts for SLA-compliance
* Blockchain business models
* Decentralized auctions in the blockchain
* Information asymmetry in the blockchain
* Decentralized Reputation Models
* Decentralized Recommendation Systems
* Privacy-preserving, secure decentralized data storage and its economics
* DIDs and anonymity
* Tokenization paradigms
* Token distribution strategies
* Data Provenance
* Chains of trust in the blockchain
* Data access control in the blockchain
* Gas fee determination and stabilization

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/ Accepted Special Topic Session: Regulation Reformation for
Balancing Blockchain Innovation /
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Industries claim that regulations do not accompany the industries’
demand for a comprehensive systematic reformation despite the
governments’ extensive investments and regional regulatory
sandboxes. Five panelists from academic, industrial, and legal
communities address what regulations affect blockchain innovation
involving the architecture incompatible with the regulatory
framework and discuss reimagining the regulations for blockchain’s
societal transformation.

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/ Conference Organization /
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Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda (University of Haifa, Israel)
Jorn Altmann (Seoul National University, South-Korea)
Jose Angel Banares (Zaragoza University, Spain)
Karim Djemame (University of Leeds, UK)
Maurizio Naldi (Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA), Italy)
Vlado Stankovski (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Bruno Tuffin (Inria Rennes, France)

Contact for Questions: gecon2021@easychair.org