34th International Symposium on Distributed Computing
October 12-16, 2020
Freiburg, Germany

http://www.disc-conference.org/wp/disc2020/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/podc_disc

* Corona contingency plan

The steering committee is monitoring the situation with COVID19 and is
considering measures to ensure a safe environment for all participants.
Announcements will be published on the conference’s website.

If the situation warrants it, the conference will either be
postponed or held virtually. Several conferences are exploring
possibilities and we will be learning from their experience.
LIPIcs assured us that they will publish the proceedings even if the
conference is virtual.

* DATES

Registration (regular papers and brief announcements): May 7, 2020 (AoE)
Submission (regular papers and brief announcements): May 14, 2020 (AoE)

Notification (regular papers): July 20, 2020
Notification (brief announcements): July 27, 2020
Final version for proceedings: August 10, 2020

Main conference: October 13-15, 2020
Workshops: October 12 and 16, 2020

* SCOPE

Original contributions to theory, design, implementation, modeling,
analysis, or application of distributed systems and networks are
solicited. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– Biological and nature-inspired distributed algorithms
– Blockchain protocols
– Communication networks: protocols, architectures and applications
– Distributed and concurrent data structures, replication and consistency
– Distributed computing: Algorithms and upper bounds
– Distributed computing: Lower bounds and impossibility results
– Distributed graph algorithms
– Distributed machine learning and data science
– Distributed operating systems, middleware, database systems
– Experimental evaluation of distributed algorithms and systems
– Fault tolerance, reliability, availability
– Formal methods for distributed computing: verification, synthesis and testing
– Game-theoretic and knowledge-based approaches to distributed computing
– Internet and Web applications, social networks and recommendation systems
– Massively-parallel, high-performance, cloud and grid computing
– Mobile agents, autonomous distributed systems, swarm robotics
– Multiprocessor and multi-core architectures and algorithms
– Population protocols and chemical reaction networks
– Security in distributed computing, cryptographic protocols
– Self-stabilizing, self-organizing, and autonomous systems
– Synchronization, persistence and transactional memory
– System-on-chip and network-on-chip architectures
– Wireless, mobile, sensor and ad-hoc networks

* SUBMISSIONS

Papers are to be submitted electronically at https://disc2020.hotcrp.com/

Submissions must be in English in pdf format and they must be
prepared using the LaTeX style template for LIPIcs
(https://submission.dagstuhl.de/documentation/authors) with
\documentclass[a4paper,anonymous,USenglish]{lipics-v2019}.

Submissions must be anonymous, without any author names,
affiliations, or email addresses. The contact information of the
authors will be entered separately in HotCRP.

Submissions not conforming to the submission guidelines and papers
outside of the scope of the conference will be rejected without
consideration.

* NOTES ON DOUBLE-BLIND PEER REVIEW

We will use a fairly relaxed implementation of double-blind peer
review in DISC 2020. You are free to disseminate your work through
arXiv and other online repositories and give presentations on your
work as usual.

However, please make sure you do not mention your own name or
affiliation in the submission, and please do not include obvious
references that reveal your identity. A reviewer who has not
previously seen the paper should be able to read it without
accidentally learning the identity of the authors.

Brief announcements should also be submitted without author names
and affiliations so that a reviewer can form an initial judgment
without bias, but they can contain a reference to the full version
of the work in the bibliography.

Please feel free to ask the PC chair if you have any questions
about the double-blind policy of DISC 2020.

* REGULAR PAPERS

Regular submission must report on original research that has not
previously appeared and is not currently under review for or
concurrently submitted to a journal or a conference with published
proceedings. Any overlap with a published or concurrently submitted
paper must be clearly indicated.
A submission must not exceed 15 pages, excluding the references.

All of the ideas necessary for an expert to fully verify the
central claims in the paper, including experimental results, should
be included, some of which may be placed in a clearly marked
appendix that will be read at the discretion of the program
committee.

* BRIEF ANNOUNCEMENTS

Brief announcements may describe work in progress or work presented
elsewhere.

The length of a brief announcement should be at most 3 pages
(including everything). The title of a brief announcement must
begin with “Brief Announcement:”.

A regular submission that is not selected for a regular presentation
may be invited by the PC for the brief announcements track.

* PUBLICATION

The proceedings will be published by LIPIcs. The final version of
the paper has to be formatted following the LIPIcs guidelines.
Regular papers will have 15 pages in the final proceedings
(excluding references), and brief announcements will have 3 pages
in the proceedings (including everything). If more space is needed,
the authors are encouraged to post the full version e.g. on arXiv
and refer to it in their paper.

Accepted papers and brief announcements must be presented by one of
the authors, with a full registration, at the conference site, and
according to the final schedule. Any submission accepted into the
technical program but not presented on-site will be withdrawn from
the final proceedings.

* AWARDS

Awards will be given to the best paper and the best student paper.
To be eligible for the best student paper award at least one of the
paper authors must be a full-time student at the time of
submission, and the student(s) must have made a significant
contribution to the paper.

* PROGRAM COMMITTEE

– James Aspnes, Yale (USA)
– Hagit Attiya (chair), Technion (Israel)
– Leonid Barenboim, Open University of Israel (Israel)
– Petra Berenbrink, Universität Hamburg (Germany)
– Armando Castañeda, UNAM (Mexico)
– Keren Censor-Hillel, Technion (Israel)
– Tudor David, Oracle Labs (Switzerland)
– Carole Delporte-Gallet, Université Paris Diderot (France)
– David Doty, University of California, Davis (USA)
– Aleksandar Dragojevic, Microsoft (UK)
– Constantin Enea, Université Paris Diderot (France)
– Matthias Fitzi, IOHK (Switzerland)
– Paola Flocchini, University of Ottawa (Canada)
– Sebastian Forster, University of Salzburg (Austria)
– Luisa Gargano, Università di Salerno (Italy)
– Eric Goubault, École Polytechnique (France)
– Guy Gueta, VMware Research (Israel)
– Joe Izraelevitz, University of Colorado, Boulder (USA)
– Anne-Marie Kermarrec, EPFL (Switzerland)
– Alex Kogan, Oracle Labs (USA)
– Dariusz R. Kowalski, Augusta University (USA)
– Moti Medina, Ben Gurion University (Israel)
– Alessia Milani, LaBRI – Bordeaux INP (France)
– Adam Morrison, Tel Aviv University (Israel)
– Lata Narayanan, Concordia University (Canada)
– Thomas Nowak, Université Paris-Saclay (France)
– Dominik Pająk, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (Poland)
– Boaz Patt-Shamir, Tel Aviv University (Israel)
– Andrzej Pelc, Université du Québec en Outaouais (Canada)
– Christian Scheideler, University of Paderborn (Germany)
– Jennifer Welch, Texas A&M University (USA)
– Moti Yung, Google & Columbia University (USA)

* ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

General chair:
Fabian Kuhn, University of Freiburg, Germany

Web co-chairs:
Philipp Bamberger and Philipp Schneider, University of Freiburg, Germany

Program committee chair:
Hagit Attiya, Technion, Israel

Workshops and tutorials chair:
Moti Medina, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

* STEERING COMMITTEE

– Hagit Attiya, Technion, Israel
– Fabian Kuhn, University of Freiburg, Germany
– Yoram Moses, Technion, Israel (chair)
– Merav Parter, Weizmann Institute, Israel
– Andrea Richa, Arizona State University, USA (vice chair)
– Ulrich Schmid, TU Wien, Austria
– Jukka Suomela, Aalto University, Finland

Nomination deadline: March 15, 2020

The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is named for
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002), a pioneer in the area of
distributed computing. His seminal works on concurrency primitives
(such as semaphores), concurrency problems (such as mutual
exclusion and deadlock), finding shortest paths in graphs,
fault-tolerance, and self-stabilization are important foundations
upon which the field of distributed computing is built.

The prize is given for outstanding papers on the principles of
distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory
and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least
a decade. The Prize includes an award of $2000.

The Prize is sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles
of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on
Distributed Computing (DISC). This award is presented annually,
with the presentation taking place alternately at ACM PODC and
EATCS DISC. In 2020, it will be presented at PODC. The winners of
the award will share the cash award, and each winning author will
be presented with a plaque. An announcement of each year’s prize
recipient(s) will be included in the PODC and DISC proceedings of
that year, describing the paper’s lasting contributions.

Nominations and Eligibility:

Nominations by any member of the scientific community are eligible,
as long as the nominated work has had a significant impact on research
areas of interest within the theory of distributed computing
community, and as long as the year of the original publication is
at least ten years prior to the year in which the award is given.

Papers authored or co-authored by members of the Award Committee will
not be eligible for consideration. Members of the Award Committee can
nominate papers. However, they must carefully consider
nominations from within the community. Members of the Award Committee
will be especially sensitive to conflict-of-interests issues if
papers by former students or close colleagues are nominated.
(Members of the Award Committee cannot nominate such papers themselves.)
Self-nominations are not allowed.

The nomination must include a short paragraph (approximately 200 words)
summarizing the contribution of the nominated work. The nomination
may include additional material, for example, support letters, but its
total length should not exceed six pages.

Your nomination must be sent to the chair of the 2020 Award Committee,
Hagit Attiya (hagit@cs.technion.ac.il).
The nomination deadline is March 15, 2020.

Selection Process:

Although the Award Committee is encouraged to consult with the
distributed computing community at large, the Award Committee is
solely responsible for the selection of the winner of the award. The
prize may be shared by more than one paper. All matters relating to
the selection process that are not specified here are left to the
discretion of the Award Committee.

The list of past winners can be found at http://www.podc.org/dijkstra/
and http://www.disc-conference.org/wp/dijkstra-prize/

Award Committee for 2020:
Hagit Attiya, Technion (chair)
Christian Cachin, University of Bern
Rachid Guerraoui, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Nancy Lynch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Yoram Moses, Technion
Paul Spirakis, University of Liverpool and University of Patras
Alex Schwarzmann, Augusta University