DSN-2023: Research Track Call For Contributions

Society is increasingly dependent on the robust functioning of all types of computing systems. These systems include mobile/edge devices, networks, personal computers, and large-scale systems that provide services we use in our everyday lives for many applications and problems. Failure, incorrect operation or compromise of computing systems and networks can have dire implications on safety and security of human and other lives as well as the environment.

The Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) is devoted to the mission of ensuring that the computing systems and networks on which society relies are robust, i.e., dependable and secure.

DSN, one of the longest running IEEE conferences organizing its 53rd edition in 2023, has pioneered the fusion between dependability and security research under a common body of knowledge, understanding the need to simultaneously fight against accidental faults, intentional (malicious) attacks, design errors, and unexpected operating conditions. Its distinctive approach to both accidental faults and malicious attacks has made DSN the most prestigious international forum for presenting research that pushes the boundaries in robustness and resilience of a wide spectrum of computing systems and networks.

All aspects of research and practice of computer system robustness (i.e., dependability and security) are within the scope of DSN. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: 1) innovative systems, architectures, protocols, and algorithms for preventing, detecting, diagnosing, eliminating or recovering from accidental and malicious threats as well as 2) practical experimentation with and assessment of the robustness (dependability and security) of all types of computing systems and networks.

Authors are invited to submit original papers on all topics within this broad scope. Example topical areas include but are not limited to the following:

• Hardware (e.g., microprocessors, memory systems, systems on chip, I/O devices, storage systems,Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), edge and mobile devices, data center infrastructure, hardware accelerators, emerging technologies, emerging paradigms like processing in memory & quantum computing)
• Software (e.g., applications, middleware, distributed algorithms, operating systems, software security, dependable software design)
• Networked systems and clouds (e.g., wireless networks, mobility, software-defined networking, edge computing, cloud computing/storage, networks on chip, network security)
• Autonomous systems (e.g., self-driving vehicles, autonomous robots, assured autonomy, explainable decision making, acceptability, privacy issues)
• Cyber-physical systems (e.g., embedded systems, real-time control of critical systems, internet of things, smart grid, automotive, aerospace, railway, medical systems)
• Distributed ledgers/Blockchain (e.g., BFT/consensus algorithms, cryptocurrencies, decentralized storage, zero knowledge proofs)
• AI/Machine Learning for resilient systems (e.g., robust, resilient, secure, and explainable AI/Machine Learning techniques; applications of AI/ML techniques for dependability and security, robustness issues in ML/AI systems)
• Models and methodologies for programming, evaluating, verifying, and assessing robust (dependable and secure) systems (e.g., performance and dependability evaluation, analytical and numerical methods, simulation, experimentation, benchmarking, verification, field data analysis)
• Emerging technologies and computing paradigms (e.g., robustness, security, dependability issues of emerging memory and storage systems, emerging computing paradigms like quantum computing, processing in memory/sensors/storage/network, 3-dimensional architectures, new hardware/software cooperative paradigms, emerging programming and system paradigms)

Important dates

• Dec. 7, 2022: Paper submission deadline
• Jan. 28, 2023: Early reject notification
• Feb. 15 - 28, 2023: Author rebuttal & revision period
• Mar. 17, 2023: Notification to authors
• * All dates refer to AoE time (Anywhere on Earth)

Information to authors

Innovative papers in all areas of robust (dependable and secure) systems and networks will be considered. Papers will be assessed with criteria appropriate to each category. The conference broadly and inclusively favors innovative and insightful research that explores new territory, continues a significant research dialogue, or reflects on experience with (or measurements of) state-of-the-art systems. Submissions will be judged on insight, originality, significance, correctness and potential impact.

Research Papers, Practical Experience Reports, and Tool Descriptions will be refereed and included in the Proceedings of the DSN 2023, if accepted.

All contributions must be written in English. IEEE Computer Society will publish accepted contributions.

At least one author of every accepted paper is expected to register (as a regular registration) for the conference and present the work.

Paper Categories

Submissions can be made in one of the following categories (authors are required to indicate the category as part of the paper’s title).

Regular papers (11 pages): full paper describing research contribution, including experimental work focused on implementation and evaluation of existing techniques in the DSN thematic areas. Papers should clearly describe a novel scientific contribution and a significant advancement of the state of knowledge in DSN relevant topics. The paper should address a significant problem with a compelling solution whose validity and practical applicability are clearly discussed.

Practical experience reports (7 pages): a shorter paper describing practitioner experiences or lessons learned applying tools and techniques to real-world problems and systems, or based on the empirical analysis of field data using a rigorous scientific approach. A paper in this category is expected to show new insights and experiences informing the research and practice of robust computing system design. Contributions reporting on industry practical experiences and lessons learned are highly encouraged, including studies reporting negative results or challenges about the practical applicability or scalability of research results in industry

Tool descriptions/demonstrations (7 pages): descriptions of the architecture, implementation and usage of substantive tools to aid the research and practice of dependability. A tool paper is expected to describe and demonstrate the value that the tool brings to the dependability community. Making the tool publicly available, whenever possible, is strongly encouraged.

The number of pages indicated above includes everything except the references: title page, text, figures, appendices, etc. Papers that exceed the number of pages for that submission category will be rejected without review.

Independently of the paper category, we expect all papers to provide enough detail to enable reproducibility of their experimental results and encourage authors, whenever possible, to make both the artifacts and datasets related to the paper publicly available.

Anonymization Rules

Authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their paper. An author should refer to their own related work always in the third person, just like they would refer to any other related work. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through references or acknowledgments).

Anonymization should not be done in a way to hurt the review process. For example, omitting published references or anonymizing them for the purposes of double-blind process can significantly hurt the review process. As such, only non-destructive anonymization is required. For example, system names may be left un-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work. For example, a paper on experiences with the design of .NET should not be re-written to be about "an anonymous but widely used commercial distributed systems platform."

Additionally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

• Remove authors' names and affiliations from the title page.
• Remove acknowledgement of identifying names and funding sources.
• Use care in naming your files. Source file names, e.g., Joe.Smith.dvi, are often embedded in the final output as readily accessible comments.
• Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, a good solution is to reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work.
• If you have a concurrent submission, reference it as follows: “Closely related work describes a microkernel implementation [Anonymous 2021].” with the corresponding citation: “[Anonymous 2021] Under submission. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.” This is, for example, the case for extended versions of the paper available online.
• If you cite anonymous work, you must also send the deanonymized reference(s) to the PC chair in a separate email.

Authors should also avoid broadly advertising their work in a way that reaches the reviewers even if they are not searching for it (for example, presentations in small meetings or seminars are appropriate). It is unacceptable to discuss the work with program committee members. Posting the work on ArXiV or a similar site is within the authors’ rights; however, the authors should use a different title than the submission and they should avoid specifying that the work is under submission to DSN.

Submissions that do not conform to the above submission deadline, anonymization and formatting guidelines (e.g., are too long, use fonts or line spacing smaller than what is indicated) or are unoriginal, previously published, or under submission to multiple venues, will be disregarded.

Formatting Rules

Submissions must adhere to the IEEE Computer Society camera-ready 8.5″x11″ two-column camera-ready format (using a 10-point font on 12-point single-spaced leading) as implemented by the LaTeX/Word templates available at the IEEE conference template page (last updated in 2019):

• LaTeX Package (ZIP)
• Word Template (DOC)

Each paper must be submitted as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file. All fonts must be embedded in the file. We also strongly recommend you print the file and review it for integrity (fonts, symbols, equations etc.) before submitting it. A defective printing of your paper can undermine its chance of acceptance. Please take a note of the following:

• Submissions should be anonymous.
• The page limit includes everything except references.
• The first page must include the title of the paper, the type of the paper (Regular / Practical Experience / Tool), and a maximum 150-word abstract.
• Please take into account that the title and the abstract will be used by the reviewers to bid on papers: describe the paper goals clearly, as well as the means used to achieve them.
• The first page is not a separate page, but is a part of the paper (and thus has technical material in it). Thus, this page counts toward the total page budget for the paper.
• There is no page limit for references - however, authors must not put any text or figures on the pages for the references - if so, those pages will be included in the page limits above (it is acceptable for the references to start on the last page of the paper as long as it is within the page limit).
• Pages should be numbered. (In Latex, this can be done by adding the following line just after the \maketitle command: \pagestyle{plain} )
• The use of color for figures and graphs is encouraged, but the paper should be easily readable if printed in grayscale.
• Symbols and labels used in the graphs should be readable as printed, without requiring on-screen magnification.
• Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

Paper Submissions

Papers are submitted via the submission website, available at this link https://dsn2023.hotcrp.com/.

The program committee will perform double-blind reviewing of all submissions, with help from outside referees. Papers will be held in full confidence during the reviewing process, but papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms are not acceptable and will be rejected without review.

Authors must anonymize their submissions (see Anonymization Rules). Submissions violating the formatting and anonymization rules will be rejected without review. There will be no extensions for reformatting.

Awards

DSN awards a Distinguished Paper Award to one of the accepted scientific papers and Best Paper Awards to multiple (e.g., 3) of the accepted papers. Both the Distinguished Paper Award and Best Paper Award winning papers should be presented in a special Best Paper Session at the conference.

The selection of the candidate papers for the awards is carried out as a three-step process. First, the Program Committee picks 6-7 of the accepted papers based on the review and revision process & committee discussion. Second, the Steering Committee (in consultation with the Program Chairs) chooses among these papers the 3 Best Papers that are to be presented in the Best Paper Session at the conference (all these papers receive the Best Paper Award). Third, and finally, the audience at the conference votes among these Best Papers to select the one that should receive the Distinguished Paper Award. Attendees are strongly encouraged to read the Best Papers as well as carefully listen to their presentations, and make their Distinguished Paper Award choice based on all information they have about the finalized Best Papers and their presentations at the conference.

DSN also attributes a group of awards based on nominations. These awards are the William C. Carter Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Dependability, the Rising Star in Dependability Award, the Test-of-Time Award, and the Jean-Claude Laprie Award. Please check the relevant page on the DSN website for additional details.

Review Process and Author Response

This year, in addition to the rebuttal process, DSN is introducing a Paper Revision Process. The authors will be invited to submit a revised paper (as well as a rebuttal) after receiving their reviews (and assuming their paper is not early-rejected) The major goal of the revision process is twofold:

1. to strengthen the papers by making sure reviewer comments are properly addressed in a revised version
2. to enable the reviewers to see how their comments are addressed in a revised version (which is especially useful in cases where rebuttal may not have the same effect)

Through this new process, we give the authors the ability to submit both a revised paper (based on the received reviews) and a rebuttal. These two serve different purposes. In particular, the rebuttal is useful for at least three purposes that cannot be easily accomplished with a revised paper:

1. to clarify misunderstandings (and point out any other issues) in the reviews
2. to describe plan for revisions the author would like to make but they need more time for than the revision timeframe allows
3. to provide a summary of changes that helps the authors to describe how they addressed the reviewer comments in the revised paper

The authors of all papers that are invited for revision will be allowed one extra page to properly address reviewer comments. In other words, the revised (and, if accepted, final) versions of papers will be allowed 12 pages for regular papers and 8 pages for practical experience reports or tool descriptions/demonstrations. The authors will be asked to mark and describe all the changes they made to the submission during the revision process. More information will be provided to authors of papers who are asked to provide a revision as to how to prepare, format and submit the revised version of the submission. Note that submitting a revised paper does not guarantee acceptance of the paper to the conference and all revised papers will be reviewed and discussed by the Program Committee.

DSN will continue to employ the Early Rejection Notification Policy. To save authors time, the papers that receive overwhelmingly negative scores in the first round will be notified more quickly as early-rejections instead of remaining stuck in the system until the overall reviewing process is over. As such, authors may get started earlier on improving their manuscript for a future submission, if they wish to do so.

Authors who do not receive early rejection will have the opportunity to correct, during the rebuttal and revision period, any factual inaccuracies in the reviews as well as to revise the paper based on the reviewer comments received. After the papers have been reviewed, but prior to the Program Committee meeting, the reviews will be made available to the authors for this rebuttal and revision process. Author rebuttal and revision will be made available to all PC members before the paper is discussed online as well as in the PC meeting.

All accepted papers will be subject to further approval of a PC member acting as shepherd.

Open Science Policy

After papers are accepted, the authors are encouraged to make all research results accessible to the public and ensure, if possible, that empirical studies are reproducible. In particular, DSN actively supports the adoption of open source and open data principles, and encourages all authors to make their prototypes available to the research community and disclose collected data to increase reproducibility and replicability. Note that sharing research data is not mandatory for submission or acceptance.

Ethical Considerations

Submissions describing experiments with data derived from human subjects or presenting results that might have ethical considerations should discuss how ethical and potential legal concerns were addressed and disclose if an ethics review was conducted (e.g. by the author’s institutional ethics review boards if applicable). Also, if the paper reports a potentially high-impact vulnerability, the authors should discuss the steps they have taken or plan to address these vulnerabilities (e.g., by contacting the vendors/manufacturers). The same applies if the submission deals with personal identifiable information or other kinds of sensitive data (e.g., by following applicable privacy protection regulations and rules). The PC’s review process may examine the ethical soundness of the paper just as it examines the technical soundness. The Program Committee reserves the right to reject a submission if insufficient evidence was presented that significant ethical or relevant legal concerns were appropriately addressed.

Contact the program co-chairs pc_chairs@dsn.org if you have any questions.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors and PC members are asked to declare potential conflicts during the paper submission and reviewing process. In particular, a conflict of interest must be declared under any of the following conditions: (1) anyone who shares an institutional affiliation with an author at the time of submission, (2) anyone the author has collaborated or published within the last two years, (3) anyone who was the advisor or advisee of an author, or (4) is a relative or close personal friend of the authors. For other forms of conflict and related questions, authors must explain the perceived conflict to the PC chairs.

Program committee members who have conflicts of interest with a paper, including program co-chairs, will be excluded from any discussion concerning the paper.

Submission policy for Program chairs and Organizing committee members

To avoid potential bias, the DSN Program Committee Co-Chairs are not allowed to (co-)author any submission to the conference. There are no such restrictions for the PC members and other organizing committee members including the General chairs since double blind anonymization rules and conflict of interest declaration and resolution procedures are enforced. We should emphasize that the DSN General chairs are not involved in any of the processes related to the technical program including the selection of the PC chairs and PC committee and the submission, reviewing and acceptance of papers.

Contacts

Program Committee Co-Chairs

Xavier Defago & Onur Mutlu

pc_chairs@dsn.org