4th International DisCoTec Workshop on
Context-aware Adaptation Mechanisms for Pervasive and Ubiquitous Services

Reykjavik, Iceland

Overview. Nowadays, there is a global exponential increase in the use of portable smart devices, such as tablets, smart phones, GPS, etc. These small devices have a huge impact on the everyday life of its users, either for work or leisure. As a consequence to this, the availability and behavior of the services that can be used with such devices has become a big concern. Moreover, the existing tools still have some limitations to face these concerns properly, given the heterogeneity and the unstable presence of devices and platforms, and the great variability of situations that users might encounter. To overcome these difficulties, and promote the development and widespread deployment of innovative mobile applications, more and more projects are addressing the development of context-aware adaptation mechanisms for leveraging the development of mobile applications. These projects aim at providing simple but powerful integrated approaches to support the development of applications interacting in pervasive and ubiquitous environments. Thus, these projects, as well as other projects, tackle the growing complexity of building large and dynamic distributed systems. With regards to this challenge, the CAMPUS workshop will focus on the promising approaches in the domain of context-aware adaptation mechanisms supporting the dynamic evolution of the execution context (e.g., network/device/service failures).

Special Themes
This year, the workshop intends to encourage submissions related adaptation issues addressed by some emerging themes in the service computing community:

  • Sensor as a Service relates to the integration of physical sensors into the service-oriented architectures in order to bridge the physical and virtual worlds and to support various kinds of adaptation styles and mechanisms.
  • Ambient Social Services relates to the integration of social networking principles at the core of service-oriented architectures in order to support adaptive IT infrastructure based on social connections.
  • Green IT relates to the integration of energy-saving technologies using service-oriented architectures in order to create energy efficient infrastructures that can be adapted to the environment.

Research Topics

The workshop will address an extensive set of topics related to adaptation mechanisms for context-aware services. The following contributions will be particularly welcome:

Context-awareness mechanisms for distributed systems:
• How to capture the relevant contextual properties of a distributed system?
• How to support the distribution of the context information in an efficient manner?
• How to enforce the security and privacy issues for context data?
• How to describe ontologies for context management?
• How to map context-awareness to situation-awareness using context reasoning?

Adaptation mechanisms for distributed systems:
• How to represent the adaptation knowledge of a distributed system?
• How to reason about pieces of software that need to be adapted in a distributed manner?
• How to reconfigure a distributed system with respect to the dynamic nature of the environment?
• How to deal with anticipated versus unanticipated adaptation?
• How to integrate human/computer interaction issues in adaptive systems?
• How to ensure robustness and transactional adaptations?

Innovative applications of context-awareness and adaptation mechanisms:
• Experiences in developing context-aware and adaptive applications and services,
• Testing and validation of adaptive applications and services,
• Development methodology for adaptive applications and services,
• Tool support for context-aware adaptation mechanisms and adaptive services,
• Design of platforms and infrastructures supporting context-aware adaptation mechanisms,
• New domains of applications for context-aware and adaptive applications and services.

Important dates

Paper submission: April 15, 2011
Paper notification: May 06, 2011
Camera ready: May 20, 2011
Workshop: June 09, 2011



Workshop Format

The workshop will be organized as a one-day event, consisting of a series of sessions, each devoted to the presentation of papers belonging to a common domain. Each session will end with a mini-panel between the presenters, led by the session chair or a pre-selected devil’s advocate. This year we will also like to encourage the presenters to show, when possible, a demo after the paper presentation. This format has been found to lead to lively and productive discussions. The workshop will conclude with a panel, moderated by the organizers, to discuss open issues and future trends in the field, with the aim of wrapping up the overall contributions of the event.



Submission & Publication

Selection of workshop participants will be based on the submission of a paper, poster or demo. Moreover, other participants may be invited by the organizing committee. Thus, the CAMPUS program committee seeks:

  • Technical papers, describing concrete results achieved, in no more than 12 pages (EASST style),
  • Position papers, describing on-going work and interim results, in no more than 6 pages (EASST style).
Papers will be peer-reviewed, and selected based on their originality, technical strength and topical relevance. All accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Electronic Communications of the EASST. Paper submission must be electronically as postscript or PDF (via the Submission website).

EASST2-www2.GIF



Organisation Committee


Steering Committee

Program Committee