First Workshop on Hot Topics
in System Dependability

Program Co-Chairs

George Candea, Stanford University
David Oppenheimer University of California, Berkeley

Lorenzo Alvisi University of Texas, Austin
Christian Cachin IBM Research, Zurich
Valérie Issarny INRIA / Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
Ravishankar Iyer University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Kimberly Keeton HP Labs, Palo Alto
Angelos Keromytis Columbia University
Keith Marzullo University of California, San Diego
Priya Narasimhan Carnegie Mellon University
David Patterson University of California, Berkeley
Martin Rinard Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Daniel Siewiorek Carnegie Mellon University
Amin Vahdat University of California, San Diego
Werner Vogels Amazon.com

• IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing
• IFIP Workgroup 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance
• IEICE Technical Group on Dependable Computing

Authors are invited to submit position papers to the First Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability. The goal of this workshop is to identify cutting-edge research ideas spanning the domains of fault tolerance and reliability (e.g., as reflected at conferences such as DSN and ISSRE) and systems (e.g., as reflected at conferences such as OSDI and SOSP). We are today at a historic confluence of interests between the two communities, with the former bringing decades of fault tolerance research into the domain of general purpose systems, and the latter taking an earnest interest in dependability. It is our hope that providing mutual sounding boards for plans for future research will benefit both communities and bring them closer together.

The workshop will focus on critical components of the infrastructures touching our everyday lives: operating systems, networking, security, wide-area and enterprise-scale distributed systems, mobile computing, compilers, and language design. We seek participation and contributions from both academic researchers and industry practitioners, to achieve a mix of long-range research vision and technology ideas anchored in immediate reality.

Position papers (max. 5 pages) should preferably fall into one of the following categories:

• describe a novel approach to an old problem, that promises to influence future research
• debunk an old, entrenched perspective on dependability
• articulate a brand new perspective on existing problems in dependability
• describe a new problem (and possible solution) that must be addressed by the dependable systems research community

The program committee will favor papers that are likely to generate healthy debate at the workshop. Ideas do not have to be 100% fleshed out and/or entirely backed up by quantitative measurements, but must provide credible evidence that they are feasible and must be accompanied by a compelling motivation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• automated failure management, that enables systems to adapt on the fly to exceptional conditions
• techniques for better detection, diagnosis, or recovery from failures
• forensic tools for administrators and programmers to use after a failure or attack
• techniques and metrics for quantifying aspects of dependability in specific domains (e.g., measuring the security of a Web service)
• tools/concepts/techniques for optimizing tradeoffs among availability, performance, correctness, and security
• novel uses of technologies not originally intended for dependability (e.g., using virtual machines to enhance dependability)

All accepted papers will be available online prior to the workshop and will be published in the supplement to the DSN proceedings. A summary of the workshop will be published in the DSN main proceedings.

The workshop's homepage is at http://www.hotdep.org/2005/.

Dates

Submission deadline	March 1, 2005 (Firm deadline, absolutely no extensions)
Acceptance notification	March 30, 2005
Camera-ready deadline	April 28, 2005

Submitting a paper

Position papers must be received by 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time on March 1, 2005. Submissions should contain no more than 5 two-column pages, including all figures and references, single-space, using 11-point font, and 1-inch margins. To submit your paper, please email it in PDF or PostScript format to hotdep-chairs@lists.stanford.edu; receipt will be confirmed within 24 hours. Author names and affiliations should appear on the title page.