Call for Ph.D. Forum Proposals

Overview

The ICAC '13 Ph.D. Forum will provide an opportunity for Ph.D. students to present their work and receive constructive feedback from experts in the field and peers. We invite students in the earlier stages of their doctoral studies (>= 1 year from being finished) to maximize the possibility that feedback can be incorporated.

Goal of the Forum

The goal of the forum is to provide feedback and advice to Ph.D. students both on the technical aspects of their research as well as in career development. We expect a range of attendees such as the presenter's peers and senior researchers who will attend to share their expertise. The idea is to create opportunities for students to meet with peers outside of their home institution, to get technical feedback and career advice from senior researchers in their field, and to articulate their own work in a public, non-threatening environment.

We expect most submissions to be from current Ph.D. students who have selected a clear research topic. However, submissions describing early work-in-progress results that may lead to the selection of a clear research topic are welcomed.

Topics

Research topics of interest include:

• End-to-end techniques for autonomic management of resources, workloads, faults, power/thermal, and other challenges
• Self-managing components, such as server, storage, network, mobile and embedded end systems, or specific application elements
• Decision and analysis techniques and their use, such as machine learning, control theory, predictive methods, emergent behavior, self-organizing networks, and rule-based systems
• Monitoring systems for autonomic computing
• Virtual machine, operating systems, hardware techniques, or application frameworks in autonomic computing
• Novel human interfaces for monitoring and controlling autonomic systems
• Management topics, such as specification and modeling of service-level agreements, behavior enforcement, and tie-in with IT governance
• Toolkits, frameworks, principles, and architectures, from software engineering practices and experimental methodologies to agent-based techniques and virtualization
• Experience with existing systems including workloads and models
• Applications of autonomics to real problems in science, engineering, business, and society

Forum Format

Early-stage Ph.D. students (working towards topic selection)

Early-stage Ph.D. students will be expected to give a short 5-minute presentation, with only a few slides (~5 slides) identifying:

1. The problem being/to be tackled
2. Why the proposed problem is important
3. Possible solutions or directions leading to a solution

Later-stage Ph.D. students (selected topic)

Later-stage Ph.D. students will be expected to give a short 10-minute presentation on their research in the style of a conference presentation, including:

1. Problem description
2. An overview of why the problem is important
3. A presentation of your solution and some evaluation results

All applicants can expect critical but constructive feedback on the presented research (or research proposal).

The Ph.D. forum is not a venue for publication; there will be no published proceedings.

Submission Instructions

If you would like to participate in the forum, please submit your materials by email before the deadline. The submission process is very lightweight. There will be no review/feedback on the submission itself: our aim is to accept all submissions that we can accommodate in the time-slot allotted. In the event that we receive more submissions than can fit into the allotted time we will make a randomized selection.

Please submit the following materials together with the required information to icac-phd13chair@usenix.org with the subject line reading [ICACPhdForum2013] no later than March 18, 2013.

All submissions:

1. Your name
2. Your affiliation
3. Your email address
4. Ph.D. advisor's name and affiliation
5. Year when you started Ph.D.

Early-stage Ph.D. students (pre-topic/early work-in-progress):

1. Ph.D. research proposal (as a PDF file formatted in 2 columns with single-spaced, 10 pt type; the PDF should be no longer than 2 pages including the title, references, figures, and all other content)
2. A URL describing the project (optional)

Later-stage Ph.D. students (topic selected):

1. Your paper (PDF file) or a pointer to a paper/extended abstract summarizing your main contribution of your doctoral research (as a PDF file formatted in 2 columns with single-spaced, 10 pt type; the PDF should be no longer than 2 pages including the title, references, figures, and all other content)
2. A URL describing the project (optional)