CLOSED Call for Papers: Special Issue on Decentralized Systems

Our world is filled with decentralized systems--human society and organizations being the most familiar examples. In such systems, we see multiple loci of control representing different parties or administrative domains.

We use the term decentralized system to mean any system formed of autonomous entities. That is, the members of a decentralized system are, belong to, or represent different people or organizations. Traditional computing is not able to deal well with decentralization. As computing systems become more integrated into our lives and grow beyond the scale of a single organization, we will need better tools and methods for designing and implementing such systems.

Relevant research into decentralized systems is scattered across multiple communities, including those focused on Web programming, multiagent systems, and distributed computing. This issue seeks to consolidate the state of the art in decentralized systems. To this end, it seeks submissions that address the challenges of developing and deploying decentralized systems. Papers on component technologies that are well-related to system-level concerns are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Sociotechnical systems with multiple stakeholders from a computational perspective
• Models of institutions and norms as a basis for building decentralized systems
• Methods and tools for supporting the construction and maintenance, including requirements modeling, software engineering, and information system design
• Programming models, methods, and tools, including languages and development frameworks
• Debugging and monitoring tools and methods
• Applications and empirical studies in specific domains (e.g., transportation or healthcare)
• Enabling technologies such as distributed ledgers, Linked Data technologies, peer-to-peer computing, and federated learning
• Construction, maintenance, querying, and reasoning of knowledge graphs as incorporated in decentralized systems
• Intelligent user interfaces for decentralized technologies including front-ends, crawlers, and browsers
• Robust and scalable management of distributed semantics
• Trust, privacy, and security despite decentralization
• Work that incorporates insights or approaches from other areas, e.g., distributed computing, semantic web, blockchain, and machine learning
• Decentralized architectures for extreme volume, heterogeneity, and dynamicity
• Evaluations of approaches for decentralized systems
• Contributions along the above dimensions that emphasize scale, complexity, or adaptivity of decentralized systems, taking into account timeliness as well as collective behavior of the system as a whole

Important Dates

Paper submissions due: 21 April 2022

First-round review due: 1 June 2022

Revision due: 7 July 2022

Final decision notification: 25 July 2022

Camera-ready submission due: 30 August 2022

Publication: November/December 2022

Submission Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information page. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system, and be sure to select the special-issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal.

Questions?

Contact the guest editors at ic6-2022@computer.org.

Guest Editors:

• Samuel Christie, North Carolina State University, USA
• Lalana Kagal, MIT, USA
• Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna, Italy
• Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University, USA