SPECIAL TRACK

Embedded Systems:

Advances along the Hardware/Software Borderline
CALL FOR PAPERS
High performance embedded computing has recently become more and more present in devices used in everyday life. A wide variety of applications, from consumer electronics to biomedical systems, require building up powerful yet cheap embedded devices. In this context, embedded software has turned out to be more and more complex, posing new challenging issues. The adoption of further flexible programming paradigms/architectures is becoming almost mandatory. Nonetheless, even nowadays the development of embedded systems must rely on a tight coupling of hardware and software components. Moreover, the market pressure calls for the employment of new methodologies for shortening the development time, and for driving the evolution of existing products. New efficient solutions to problems emerging in this setting can be put into action by means of a joint effort of academia and industry.

Design of embedded systems must take into account a wide variety of constraints: performance, code size, power consumption, presence of real-time tasks, robustness, maintainability, security, and possibly scalability. The more convenient trade-off has to be found, often operating on a large number of different parameters. In this scenario, solutions can be proposed at different levels of abstraction, making use of an assortment of tools and methodologies: researchers and practitioners have a chance to propose new ideas and to compare experimentations.

The focus of this conference track is on the application of both novel and well-known techniques to the embedded systems development. Particular attention is paid to solutions that require expertise in different fields (e.g. computer architecture, OS, compilers, security, software engineering, simulation). The track will benefit also from direct experiences in the employment of embedded devices in "unconventional" application areas, so to show up new challenges in the system design/development process. In this setting, researchers and practitioners from academia and industry will get a chance to keep in touch with problems, open issues and future directions in the field of development of dedicated applications for embedded systems.

Also in this edition of ACM SAC, the EMBS track will take part in a coordinated effort with the Operating Systems (OS) track to offer SAC attendees with a schedule with the opportunity to participate to all presentations on topics in such closely related areas.

Topics of Interest
Submissions

Only papers based on original, unpublished work and addressing the listed topics of interest will be considered. 

Each submitted paper will be fully refereed and undergo a blind review process. In order to facilitate blind review, the author(s) name(s) and address(es) must NOT appear in the body of the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. Only the title should be shown at the first page without the author's information.

Please note that submission of the same paper to multiple tracks is not allowed.

All accepted papers will be published in the ACM SAC 2013 proceedings. For each accepted paper, an author or a proxy attending SAC MUST present the paper: This is a requirement for the paper to be included in the ACM/IEEE digital library.

Submissions are accepted only in electronic form, through the SAC web submission system (accessible via the link on the menu bar on the left).

Submissions must follow the template reported here: http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2013/downloads13.htm

Camera-ready papers can be up to 6 pages long according to the conference template; up to 2 extra pages are allowed, at an additional fee of 80 USD per extra page (this last figure will be confirmed later).

SAC also hosts a poster session; authors of relevant papers that are positively evaluated, but cannot be included in the conference because of space limits, can be invited to provide their contribution in the form of a poster. A poster contribution is given a two-page space in the official SAC proceedings, and possibly an extra page is allowed (with the same rules used for regular papers).
Important dates (PAPERS)
Student Research Competition
Graduate students seeking feedback from the scientific community on their research ideas are invited to submit abstracts of their original unpublished and in-progress research work in areas of experimental computing and application development related to SAC 2013 Tracks. The Student Research Competition (SRC) program is designed to provide graduate students the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with researcher and practitioners in their areas of interest.
All research abstract submissions will be reviewed by researchers and practitioners with expertise in the track focus area to which they are submitted. Authors of selected abstracts will have the opportunity to give poster presentations of their work and compete for three top winning places. The SRC committee will evaluate and select First, Second, and Third place winners. The winners will receive cash awards and SIGAPP recognition certificates during the conference banquet dinner. Authors of selected abstracts are eligible to apply to the SIGAPP Student Travel Award program for support.

Submission - Graduate students are invited to submit abstracts (minimum of two pages; maximum of four pages) of their original unpublished and in-progress research work following the instructions published at SAC 2013 web-site. The submissions must address research work related to a SAC track, with emphasis on the innovation behind the research idea, including the problem being investigated, the proposed approach and research methodology, and sample preliminary results of the work. In addition, the abstract should reflect on the originality of the work, innovation of the approach, and applicability of anticipated results to real-world problems. All abstracts must be submitted thought the START Submission system. Submitting the same abstract to multiple tracks is not allowed.

Important dates for Research Abstracts:
R.A. Submission: October 31, 2012
Author Notification: November 30, 2012
R.A. Presentations: March 19, 2013

It is recommended to refer to the official SRC Information Sheet for further details.

Chairs
Alessio Bechini and Cosimo Antonio Prete - University of Pisa, Dept. of Information Engineering - Italy

Program Committee
Peter Altenbernd - University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt - Germany
Erik Altman - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center - USA
Sandro Bartolini - University of Siena - Italy
Valerie Bertin - ST Microelectronics - France
Joăo M. P. Cardoso - University of Porto - Portugal
Li-Pin Chang - National Chiao-Tung University - Taiwan
Mingsong Chen - East China Normal University - China
Alexander G. Dean - North Carolina State University - USA
Lavinia Egidi - University of Eastern Piedmont - Italy
Marc Engels - Flanders' Mechatronics Technology Centre, Leuven - Belgium
Pierfrancesco Foglia - University of Pisa - Italy
Gerhard Fohler - TU Kaiserslautern - Germany
Björn Franke - University of Edinburgh - UK
Malay Ganai - NEC labs America - USA
Catherine H. Gebotys - University of Waterloo - Canada
Roberto Giorgi - University of Siena - Italy
Matthias Gries - Intel Labs - Germany
Zonghua Gu - Zhejiang University, Hangzhou - China
Rajiv Gupta - University of California Riverside - USA
Frank Hannig - University of Erlangen-Nuremberg - Germany
Niraj K. Jha - Princeton University - USA
Per Gunnar Kjeldsberg - NTNU Trondheim - Norway
Andreas Krall - TU Wien - Austria
Ákos Lédeczi - Vanderbilt University - USA
Arindam Mallik - IMEC - Belgium
Claire Pagetti - ONERA - France
Andy D. Pimentel - University of Amsterdam - The Netherlands
Binoy Ravindran - VirginiaTech - USA
Christine Rochange - IRIT - France
Bastian Schlich - ABB Corporate Research - Germany
Martin Schoeberl - DTU - Denmark
Henk Sips - TU Delft - The Netherlands
Jean-Pierre Talpin - INRIA/IRISA - France
Hiroyuki Tomiyama - Ritsumeikan University - Japan
Miroslav Velev - Aries Design Automation - USA
Ning Weng - Southern Illinois University Carbondale - USA
I-Ling Yen - University of Texas at Dallas - USA
Wang Yi - Uppsala University - Sweden

Questions can be directed to the Track Chairs. Additional details are available at the track home page at http://www.ing.unipi.it/sac13 and at the conference home page at http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2013/.