Workshop Theme

The central theme of the workshop is the decentralized coordination of distributed processes:
  • decentralized: there is no single authority in the network that everything is vulnerable to.

  • coordinated: processes need to cooperate to achieve meaningful results, potentially in the face of mutual suspicion.

  • distributed: processes are separated by a potentially unreliable network.

Motivation

Today, distributed computing has become a ubiquitous technology, mainly thanks to the infrastructure of the global Internet. A major trend in distributed computing is the move towards the provision of software as a service via the network (cloud or utility computing, "Software as a Service"). As more software gets provided as a service, the question of how to coordinate this software without a common trusted computing base will grow in importance. Also, as the web continues to expand, reaching out to mobile devices and even everyday physical objects (the so-called "Internet of Things"), it will become more and more decentralized and global connectivity cannot always be assumed.

This workshop provides a forum to discuss the implications of the above trends on distributed software. We solicit constructive ideas, novel coordination abstractions, domain-specific or general-purpose distributed languages, calculi, frameworks and architectures to support the decentralized coordination of distributed processes. We are equally interested in approaches that apply or modify existing coordination models (e.g. based on actors or tuple spaces) to address decentralized coordination.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Decentralized coordination

  • Security

  • Attributing responsibility

  • Service discovery and advertising

  • Reliability

  • Availability

  • Fault-tolerance

  • Replication

  • ...

Keynote

The workshop will open with a Keynote speech by Tyler Close (Google) titled "You can get there from here. Using the Web for secure decentralized coordination."

Program Committee


  • Fred Spiessens, Evoluware, Belgium

  • Carl Hewitt, MIT EECS (Emeritus), USA

  • Ben Laurie, Google, UK

  • Alan Karp, Hewlett-Packard, USA

  • Peter Van Roy, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

  • Dean Tribble, Microsoft, USA

  • Toby Murray, University of Oxford, UK

  • Tyler Close, Google, USA

  • Mark Miller, Google, USA (organizer)

  • Tom Van Cutsem, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and Google, USA (organizer)

Attendance

Prospective participants are invited to submit a position paper of maximum 5 pages or a technical paper of maximum 15 pages. Submissions should be in PDF format and submitted via EasyChair. These papers will be reviewed by the program committee primarily based on relevance and originality. Accepted papers will be published as a volume in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science.

Important dates

Submission deadline: April 12, 2010
Notification of acceptance: May 12, 2010
Early registration deadline: May 17, 2010
Camera-ready copy: May 26, 2010
Workshop: June 10, 2010