CALL FOR PAPERS

About ICFI

The International Conference on Feature Interactions in Telecommunications and Software Systems (ICFI) has evolved out of the  Feature Interaction Workshop, which has been the primary international forum for discussion and reporting on research in the feature interaction problem in telecommunications and software systems since 1992. The forum includes:

• Invited speakers
• Presentation of research papers
• Short presentations
• Posters
• Tool demonstrations
• Excellent networking opportunities

ICFI'05 is the eighth in a series of international events addressing the issue of feature interactions. The seven previous ones were called workshops, but ICFI has renamed itself a conference reflecting the fact that it is the primary event in the field of feature interactions. The conference aims to bring together representatives of the telecommunications industry, the software industry, and the research community working on various aspects of feature interactions in order to discuss possible solutions and their practical applications, as well as setting directions for further research. Active debates will be encouraged; participants are invited to contribute topics for discussion. Poster presentations and tool demonstrations are also warmly welcomed. Original research papers are solicited, as well as brief reports on ongoing research and research already published elsewhere. 'Best paper' prizes will be awarded. As in the case of previous workshops in the series, the proceedings will be published in a book by a major international publisher.

The Feature Interaction problem

Feature interaction occurs when one feature modifies or subverts the operation of another one. This phenomenon is not unique to the domain of telecommunications systems: it can occur in any software system that is subject to changes (not to mention areas of medicine, engineering, and law that are not directly covered in this conference, but which may be taken into consideration in order to exploit useful analogies).

Although interactions among classical telephony features are now fairly well understood, the feature interaction problem presents new challenges in emerging types of systems based on policies, dynamic (Web) services, mobility, or new architectures such as Parlay, 3G, .NET, or GRID and active networks. The proliferation of players and software/service engineering techniques coupled with the constant pressure for the rapid introduction of new services and applications lead to undesirable interactions that jeopardize the quality of the products delivered as well as the satisfaction of the users. Detecting, solving, preventing, and managing such interactions at different stages of the development process are more than ever important problems that need to be addressed with cost-effective techniques and tools. Techniques successfully applied to conventional telecommunications systems are still useful in many cases, yet they may no longer be able to cope with the complexity of emerging systems.

Conference History

Year	Location	Chairs
FIW'92	St. Petersburg, Florida, USA	N. Griffeth, Y.-J. Lin
FIW'94	Amsterdam, The Netherlands	L.G. Bouma, H. Velthuijsen
FIW'95	Kyoto, Japan	K.E. Cheng, T. Ohta
FIW'97	Montreal, Canada	P. Dini, R. Boutaba, L. Logrippo
FIW'98	Lund, Sweden	K. Kimbler, L.G. Bouma
FIW'00	Glasgow, Scotland	M. Calder, E. Magill
FIW'03	Ottawa, Canada	D. Amyot, L. Logrippo
ICFI'05	Leicester, UK	S. Reiff-Marganiec, M. D. Ryan

Topics

We propose to focus the conference on the topics listed below. Contributions extending beyond this list and addressing other issues related to the interaction problem (e.g. classification, taxonomy or benchmarking) will also be welcome.

• New application areas
  • feature interactions in software systems outside the telecommunication domain, including but not limited to: networks, appliances, components, security systems, medical systems, transport systems, instant messaging, and mobile code.
• Feature interactions in emerging telecom architectures
  • Internet, Internet telephony (e.g. SIP, H.323, Megaco), agent architectures, policy-based services and architectures, Web services, 3G, Parlay, .NET, GRID networks, active networks.
• Current industrial practice and experience
  • interaction management, organisational solutions, software frameworks, inter-working.
• Enterprise-level aspects of the interaction problem.
  • multi-provider environment, business models and processes, responsibility for interaction handling, legal and regulatory aspects.
• Mechanisms for interaction detection and resolution
  • off-line methods, including service modelling, formal validation, testing techniques, software tool support, scalability and efficiency, filtering methods.
  • on-line management solutions, runtime mechanisms, signalling capabilities, inter-working of domains and platforms.
• Feature interactions in mobile and broadband services
  • proliferation of the problem, inter-working with existing networks, new manifestations and problem areas.
• User-centric view on the interaction problem
  • service personalization, usage scenarios, behaviour modelling, user-specified features, statistical usage profiles, service reliability aspects, presence/location/contextual services.
• Software-engineering view on the interaction problem
  • notations, languages, requirements engineering, service software design, quality aspects, privacy and security concerns.
  • aspects, aspect oriented programming/software development and superimpositions

Papers

Technical papers will be published as the 8th book in the series on Feature Interactions in Telecommunication and Software Systems. Accepted papers must be presented at the conference by one of the authors. Technical papers submitted may be full papers or short papers.

Full papers. These must be unpublished and must not be submitted for publication elsewhere. Submissions of full papers should not exceed 16 pages.

Short papers. In order to make the conference as complete as possible from the point of view of coverage of current research in the area, we also solicit short papers. These can be industrial reports (I), position papers (P), or summaries of research already published elsewhere (S). Such papers should not exceed 5 pages but should be sufficiently self-contained to be appreciated on their own. Each paper should be clearly labelled as I, P, or S.  Industrial reports should describe industrial case studies or industrial research directions. Position papers should propose novel research directions. Summaries should contain appropriate citations.

All submissions must be in English.

The Feature Interaction Best Paper Awards

Two prizes will be awarded at the conference:

Most Novel Domain Award

This prize will be awarded to a high-quality paper that investigates feature interaction in the most novel domain of application. This mostly excludes areas emphasized in the past, such as (POTS) telephone systems. Examples of new areas are enumerated in the first item of the suggested topics list, but others are warmly welcomed.

Best Paper Award

This award will be selected by the programme committee based on the excellence of the paper.

Submission Deadlines

January 4, 2005	Deadline for abstract submissions Please note: For reasons outwith our control, the submission server is not available on January 2 and 3 2005. Please submit before that date or on the 4th of January.
January 10, 2005	Deadline for full paper submissions Full paper submission will only be possible, if you have submitted an abstract beforehand by the above deadline!
February 14, 2005	Notification of acceptance
February 27, 2005	Submission of Camera-Ready Paper

Conference Location

The Conference is organised by the University of Leicester and the University of Birmingham, and will be located at the University of Leicester. The University of Leicester (founded 1957) delivers high quality undergraduate, postgraduate and professional education and creates research that is of international significance. 70,000 people in 160 countries hold degrees and diplomas from the University of Leicester. The Department of Computer Science has an international reputation for the excellence of its research in Algorithms & Complexity, Semantics, and Software Specification & Design. Leicester lies at the heart of England close to major motorways, and a short distance from Nottingham East Midlands Airport. Leicester railway station is a ten minute walk to the University. The campus is compact - set within attractive green spaces. ICFI'05 will take place on campus.

Organization

Conference Co-Chairs

Stephan Reiff-Marganiec Department of Computer Science University of Leicester University Road Leicester LE1 7RH, UK Email: srm13@le.ac.uk Phone: +44 0116 252-2603 Fax: +44 0116 252-3604 Web: http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/~srm13/

Mark Ryan School of Computer Science University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT, UK Email: m.d.ryan@cs.bham.ac.uk Phone: +44 121 414-7361 Fax: +44 121 414-4281 Web: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mdr/

Programme Committee

Daniel Amyot	University of Ottawa, Canada
Lynne Blair	University of Lancaster, England
Muffy Calder	University of Glasgow, Scotland
Jose Fiadeiro	University of Leicester, England
Michael Fisher	University of Liverpool, England
Kathi Fisler	Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
Tom Gray	PineTel, Canada
Jean-Charles Grègoire	INRS-Telecommunications, Canada
Dimitar Guelev	Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Robert J. Hall	AT&T Labs Research, USA
Mario Kolberg	University of Stirling, Scotland
Luigi Logrippo	Universite du Quebec en Outaouais, Canada
Evan Magill	University of Stirling, Scotland
Dave Marples	Global Inventures, USA
Alice Miller	University of Glasgow, Scotland
Masahide Nakamura	Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Tadashi Ohta	Soka University, Tokyo, Japan
Farid Ouabdesselam	LSR-IMAG, Grenoble, France
Pierre-Yves Schobbens	University of Namur, Belgium
Henning Schulzrinne	Columbia University, USA
Ken Turner	University of Stirling, Scotland
Pamela Zave	AT&T, USA

Contacts

Queries to the Organising Committee may be sent to: fiw05@mcs.le.ac.uk