Call for papers | UCC 2021
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Call for Papers

The digital transformation of all areas of life is accelerated in this decade by novel cloud services, e-infrastructures, data platforms and cyber-physical system integration. This broader scope of cloud computing calls for technically sound contributions that combine scale with convenience and reliability. Society and economy depend on cloud applications delivering compute power on demand in every location along data paths as a general service to the public, in analogy to conventional utilities. The engineering of such systems and applications calls for scientifically proven approaches, methods, tools and technologies.

Providing a forum to review and discuss possible solutions, UCC is the premier IEEE/ACM conference for areas related to Cloud Computing as a Utility where leading researchers and practitioners in this important and growing field gather on an annual basis.

This will be the 14th UCC in a successful conference series of community-driven events. Previous events were held in Shanghai, China (Cloud 2009), Melbourne, Australia (Cloud 2010 & UCC 2011), Chennai, India (UCC 2010), Chicago, USA (UCC 2012), Dresden, Germany (UCC 2013), London, UK (UCC 2014), Limassol, Cyprus (UCC 2015), Shanghai, China (UCC 2016), Austin, Texas, USA (UCC 2017), Zurich, Switzerland (UCC 2018), Auckland, New Zealand (UCC 2019) and online during the pandemic (UCC 2020).

UCC 2021 will be hosted at the University of Leicester. The city of Leicester is a major city in the middle of country and is well connected to the rest of the world with road, rail and air networks.

UCC 2021 offers a technical programme, workshops, tutorials, and a doctoral symposium. The event will have a co-located 8th International Conference on Big Data Computing Applications and Technologies (BDCAT 2021).

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research manuscripts in all areas of Cloud and Utility Computing and related computing paradigms such as Fog/Edge, Serverless and Distributed Computing.

NEW in 2021: UCC submissions continue to use a double column format for review based on the new single-column template to facilitate the new ACM production process; the details are described in separate submission instructions.

Also NEW in 2021: Authors of accepted papers can opt into reproducible research decoration; the details are described below.

Topics of interest include (but not limited to):

  • Formal and qualitative aspects of Cloud technology
  • Security, trust and privacy in Clouds, and Cloud-hosted Blockchains
  • Architectural models and patterns to achieve Utility in Clouds
  • Cloud business and legal implications beyond technology
  • Cloud Computing middleware, stacks, tools, delivery networks and services at all layers (XaaS)
  • Cloud large-scale foundations for Big Data, IoT, and real-time analytics
  • Cloud management: autonomic, adaptive, self-*, SLAs, and monitoring
  • Cloud-native application design, engineering and serverless/microservice implementation
  • Cloud, Fog and edge/mobile devices management, hierarchy models, and business models
  • Designs and deployment models for Clouds: private, public, hybrid, federated, aggregated
  • Economic and business models of Clouds and services
  • High Performance Computing and the Cloud
  • Innovative cloud applications and experiences
  • Integration of Cloud systems with Fog/edge and IoT devices, continuum computing
  • Leading edge topics such as hybrid quantum clouds, coded computing and FHE
  • Mobile and energy-efficient use of Clouds
  • Networking for clouds and data centres
  • Performance analysis and modelling of cloud systems and applications
  • Policy languages and programming models
  • Principles and theoretical foundations of Utility Computing
  • Resource management and scalability: brokering, scheduling, capacity planning, and elasticity
  • Utility-driven platforms for Clouds
  • Utility-driven models and mechanisms for interclouds / federations
  • Virtualization, containerization, composition, orchestration and other enablers

Important Dates (all AoE - Anywhere on Earth):

  • Paper Submissions Due: September 5, 2021
  • Notification of Acceptance: October 10, 2021
  • Camera ready papers due: October 31, 2021
  • Early registration Deadline: October 31, 2021

Check separate UCC calls for workshops, tutorials and other tracks.

Paper Submission:

NEW in 2021: UCC submissions continue to use a double column format for review based on the new single-column template to facilitate the new ACM production process.

Submitted manuscripts must represent original unpublished research that is not currently under review for any other conference or journal. Manuscripts are submitted in PDF format and may not exceed ten (10) ACM-formatted *double-column* pages, including figures, tables, and references. The limit is six (6) pages for workshop papers.

All manuscripts will be reviewed and judged on correctness, originality,technical strength, rigour in analysis, quality of results, quality of presentation, and interest and relevance to the conference attendees. Your submission is subject to a determination that you are not under any sanctions by ACM.

Accepted papers will later be converted into single-column format through the ACM TAPS process and therefore need to use the new templates that are single-column by default. Switch them to double-column for authoring your paper. This is possible in both the Word and the LaTeX templates.

LaTeX: \documentclass[sigconf,screen,review]{acmart}

Word: Format - Page - Columns - set to 2

At least one author of each paper must be registered for the conference in order for the paper to be published in the proceedings. The conference proceedings will be published by the ACM and made available online via the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital Library.

Formatting: https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow

Main track submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ucc2021

Workshop submissions: see respective workshop information

Reproducibility:

The authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit supporting materials to be made publicly available as 'source materials' in the ACM Digital Library. The materials (data, code, models etc.) will be vetted by an evaluation process run by a separate committee. This submission is voluntary but encouraged for better highlighting the contributions that facilitate high-quality research. Papers that pass through the process successfully will receive badges printed on them.

Awards and Special Issues:

A selection commission chaired by the UCC 2021 technical programme committee will select and acknowledge the best paper and the best student paper to receive an award during the conference.

Authors of highly rated papers from UCC 2021 will be invited to submit an extended version to special issues of prestigious journals, including the SpringerOpen Journal of Cloud Computing.