Call for Papers

DISC 2024 will be held in Madrid, Spain on October 28 – November 1, 2024.

Submission site: https://disc24.hotcrp.com

DISC 2024 seeks submissions across all areas of distributed algorithms and distributed systems, including the theory, design, implementation, modeling, analysis, and applications of distributed algorithms, systems and networks. More precisely, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Biologically-inspired distributed algorithms
  • Blockchain protocols
  • Coding and reliable communication
  • Communication networks: algorithms, protocols, and applications
  • Complexity, lower bounds, and impossibility results
  • Design and analysis of distributed algorithms
  • Distributed and concurrent data structures
  • Distributed algorithms for clouds and IoT
  • Distributed graph algorithms
  • Distributed machine learning and data science
  • Distributed operating systems, middleware, database systems
  • Distributed resource management
  • Fault tolerance, reliability, self-organization, self-stabilization
  • 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
  • Overlay networks and peer-to-peer networks
  • Population protocols and chemical reaction networks
  • Quantum distributed algorithms
  • Replication, consensus, and consistency
  • Security in distributed computing, distributed cryptographic protocols
  • Synchronization, persistence and transactional memory
  • Wireless, mobile, sensor and ad-hoc networks

DISC 2024 encourages submissions from emerging areas related to distributed computing.

Dates

  • Paper registration: May 7 (AoE)
  • Paper submission: May 14 (AoE)
  • Reviews released and rebuttals start: July 4
  • Rebuttal ends: July 10
  • Notification: August 2
  • Camera-ready due: August 22

Submissions

All submissions should clearly motivate the importance of the problem being addressed to the community, discuss relevant prior work in the area and its relationship to the paper, precisely state the paper’s key contributions, and then outline the key technical ideas and methods used to reach the stated claims. A submission should strive to be accessible to a broad audience, as well as having sufficient detail for experts in the area to validate the soundness of the results.

DISC expects two types of submissions: regular papers and brief announcements.

  • Regular papers must report on original research that has not previously been published (and may not be concurrently submitted to other journals or conferences with proceedings). All ideas necessary for an expert to fully verify the central claims in a paper, including experimental results, should be included in the submission. 
  • A brief announcement may describe work in progress or work presented elsewhere. A brief announcement may also present a result that is short and elegant, but does not require a longer paper. It may also be used to announce a software distribution or an experimental result of interest that can be concisely described.

A paper that is not accepted as a regular paper may be invited as a brief announcement. In this case, per LIPIcs guidelines, the brief announcement version of the paper should be submitted for review by a specific deadline. All brief announcements, irrespective of submission path, will receive the same presentation time during the conference, and will have the same page limit in the proceedings.

Submission format

Submissions must be in English in pdf format and they must be prepared using the LaTeX style template for LIPIcs (https://submission.dagstuhl.de/series/details/5#author) with
\documentclass[a4paper,anonymous,USenglish]{lipics-v2021}.

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

For regular papers, there is no page limit, and authors are encouraged to use the “full version” of their paper as the submission. However, the initial 15 pages should contain a clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including a discussion of the paper’s importance within the context of prior work and a description of the key technical and conceptual ideas used to achieve its main claims. (We encourage illustrations.) The submission must contain complete proofs of all claims in the paper. 

We note that, although there is no page limit, material other than the first 15 pages will be read at the committee’s discretion. Papers submitted as brief announcements should comply with the above rules, but with a limit of 5 pages instead of 15 pages.

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

Anonymity rules

As in previous years, we employ a relaxed double-blind peer review system. Specifically, the submission itself must not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. In particular, the authors’ names and affiliation should not directly appear in the submitted document, and should ensure that any references to their own related work are in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”).

The goal of double-blind peer review is to help PC members and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias; it is not to make it impossible for reviewers to discover the authors, nor to limit the dissemination of results via alternative means. Specifically, authors are still free to disseminate their work through arXiv and other online repositories, and give presentations on your work while under review. Moreover, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or complicates reviewing: for instance, please do not anonymize or obfuscate references.

Brief announcements should also be submitted without author names and affiliations on the first page; however, they can directly reference the full version of the work in the bibliography.

Use of Large Language Models (LLMs)

The use of LLMs for submission preparation is permitted, although it is highly recommended that they only be used for cosmetic changes, e.g. proofreading of the text. Ultimately, the authors are responsible for the contents of their submissions, and egregious LLM mis-use may result in rejection. Any questions about the double-blind policy or LLM use policies should be directed to the PC chair, Dan Alistarh (dan.alistarh@ist.ac.at).

Conflict of interest

The submission form provides an opportunity to specify conflicts of interest with any of the PC members. If you feel that you have a valid reason for a conflict of interest beyond the PC members, or any other issues related to the fair treatment of your submission, contact the PC chair, Dan Alistarh, or the SafeTOC representatives for DISC.

Participation at DISC

It is expected that accepted papers and brief announcements will be presented in-person at the conference.

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 5 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.

Extended and revised versions of selected papers will be considered for a special issue of the journal Distributed Computing. The best paper at DISC will be considered for publication in the Journal of the ACM.

Accepted papers and brief announcements must be presented by one of the authors, with a full registration and according to the final schedule.

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. The latter should be indicated at submission time.