CLOSED Call for Papers: Special Track on COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to a historic turning point. While the pandemic is transforming our normal lives in unprecedented ways, the computing and information services ecosystems have provided much-needed support to the continuity of social interactions and organizational functions. As COVID-19 continues to expose the weaknesses of current services ecosystems, it inspires novel science-driven services and computing research aimed at delivering secure, privacy-aware, resilient, and Internet-scale services during pandemics.

This TSC special track solicits impactful research manuscripts in the areas of services computing that will be of immediate value to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as for future pandemic and crisis situations. Both theoretical and applied/practical contributions are encouraged. The manuscripts are expected to:

• Address issues pertinent to the COVID-19 pandemic under the paradigm of services computing.
• Provide consumable artifacts (e.g., container images, API services, phone/web apps, etc.) and/or open datasets that make the reported research results reproducible and/or composable by others.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Pandemic-focused financial, healthcare, and public health services
• Secure and resilient high-performance platforms and services for pandemics
• Services for contact tracing and symptom management during pandemics
• Mobile crowdsourcing and services for pandemic data collection and analytics
• Human factors for accessible services during pandemics
• Scalable social media/networking services for mobile/home workers during pandemics
• Personal online learning services and/or service-oriented platforms during pandemics
• Microservices, DevOps, and API services fabrics for scalable/resilient pandemic apps/solutions
• Elastic and agile enterprise service composition platforms/paradigms for pandemic situations
• Privacy-aware, secure, and resilient services for crisis management during pandemics
• Trusted AI and machine learning based services for epidemiological prediction
• Services for infodemics and misinformation management
• IoT, edge, cloud, and blockchain microservices for pandemic applications/services/solutions
• Pandemic-driven next generation sensor and mobile service ecosystems, including 5G and beyond

Submission Guidelines

Manuscript submission is open and can be submitted until 30 September 2021. Submitted papers will be reviewed as they come. Our goal is to expedite the review process so as to include accepted papers in upcoming issues as soon as possible.

Every submission must include a section justifying how its research contributions address unique open issues relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic and how they are aligned with the research scope of TSC. Please submit your manuscripts (12–14 pages each) through the TSC online system and select “Special track on COVID-19 and Future Pandemics.” Author guidelines are available here. Submitted manuscripts should not have been previously published, nor be currently under review for publication elsewhere. They should provide, at minimum, 30% original technical contributions in comparison to previous publications.

Special Track Chairs

Contact the chairs at tsc1-2020@computer.org.

• Surya Nepal, Data61, CSIRO, Australia
• Mei-Ling Shyu, University of Miami, USA
• Valerie Issarny, Inria, France