Call For Papers, ACM IMC 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) is a highly selective venue for the presentation of measurement-based research in data communications. The focus of IMC 2019 will be on research that improves the practice of network measurement, illuminates some facet of an operational network, or both. We encourage authors to discuss the implications of their results to future research and/or to operations. We also encourage authors to discuss representativeness and limitations of their work due to coverage of their measurements across space and time.

IMC takes a broad view of contributions that are considered in scope for improving the practice of network measurement, including, but not limited to:

• collection and analysis of data that yield new insights about network structure and network performance (e.g., traffic, topology, routing, energy utilization)
• collection and analysis of data that yield new insights about application and end-user behavior (e.g., economics, privacy, security, application interaction with protocols)
• modeling of network internals and application behavior (e.g., workloads, scaling behavior, assessment of performance bottlenecks)
• methods and tools to monitor and visualize network-based phenomena
• novel systems and algorithmic techniques that leverage measurement-based findings
• advances in data collection, analysis, and storage (e.g., anonymization, querying, sharing)
• reappraisal of previous empirical findings
• descriptions of challenges and future directions the measurement community should pursue

Operational networks of interest include:

• the Internet backbone
• edge networks (e.g., home networks, cellular networks, WLANs)
• data center networks and cloud computing infrastructure
• software-defined networks and network function virtualization
• peer-to-peer, overlay, and content distribution networks
• infrastructure for online social networks
• experimental networks, prototype networks, and future Internetworks
• large-scale distributed systems and online services

Authors unsure about topical fit are welcome to contact the program committee co-chairs at imc2019pcchairs@sigcomm.org.

Review process and criteria

IMC 2019 invites two forms of submissions:

• Full papers (up to 13 pages for text and figures + unlimited pages for references) that describe original research, with succinctness appropriate to the topics and themes they discuss.
• Short papers (up to 6 pages for text and figures + unlimited pages for references) that convey work that is less mature but shows exciting promise, OR offer results that do not merit a full submission. Short papers could articulate a high-level vision and describe challenging future directions that the authors believe the community should tackle; validate, verify, or update important results; or present new ideas that challenge existing assumptions.

Any submission exceeding short paper page-length limit will be evaluated as a full paper.

Authors should only submit original work that has not been published before and is not under submission to any other venue. We will consider full paper submissions that extend previously published short, preliminary papers (including IMC short papers) following the model of the ACM SIGCOMM policy.

IMC 2019 will bestow two awards on paper submissions, a Best Paper award and a Community Contribution award. The best paper award will recognize the outstanding paper at the conference, and all accepted papers are eligible for it. The community contribution award will recognize a paper with an outstanding contribution to the community in the form of a novel dataset, source code distribution, open platform, or other noteworthy service to the community. To be eligible for the community award, the authors must make publicly available their dataset (e.g., through DatCat for Internet measurement data or CRAWDAD for wireless data) or source code (e.g., via GitHub, Bitbucket), or have an open working platform, etc., by the camera-ready deadline. The authors indicate their eligibility on the submission form and are also encouraged to include a link to the contribution in the submitted paper itself.

Paper Anonymity

IMC will use double blind submissions, per the following guidelines:

• Author names and affiliations must not appear on any submission.
• Identifying information such as grant numbers must not be included on submissions.
• The text of the submission must refer to the authors’ own previous work in the third person.

Note that the IMC PC will grant exceptions to the double-blind policy in rare cases. Additional details on paper anonymity are available here and in the statement released by the IMC Steering Committee here.

Ethical Considerations

Papers describing experiments with users or sensitive user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information) must follow basic precepts of ethical research and subscribe to community norms. These include: respect for privacy, secure storage of sensitive data, voluntary and informed consent if users are placed at risk, avoiding deceptive practices when not essential, beneficence (maximizing the benefits to an individual or to society while minimizing harm to the individual), and risk mitigation. In previous years, IMC has encouraged authors to include a section discussing particularly thorny ethical issues. However, experience has shown that authors often either elide or give short shrift to ethical discussions—preferring to use their page budget for results. This, in turn, poses difficulties for the program committee when it must wrestle with ethical issues. Therefore, for IMC 2019, extra space to discuss ethical issues in the form of an appendix that does not count against the submissions’s overall page budget. Authors are encouraged—but not required—to include such an appendix that concisely fleshes out any thorny ethical dilemmas the study raises. Note, this discussion must appear as an appendix or will count towards the paper’s page budget. Further, the additional space must only be used for discussion of ethical issues and not to circumvent the page limit for additional non-ethics related content.

The PC takes a broad view of what constitutes an ethical concern. Note that submitting research for approval by each author’s institutional ethics review body may be necessary, but not sufficient. The PC will strive to give papers the benefit of the doubt in terms of appropriately dealing with ethical issues. However, in cases where the PC has concerns about the ethics of the work, the PC will consider the ethical soundness and justification, just as it does the paper’s technical soundness. Therefore, authors are strongly encouraged to deal with these issues directly in the appendix. Authors unsure about ethical issues are welcome to contact the program committee co-chairs at imc2019pcchairs@sigcomm.org.

Authors may wish to consult these references as they think about the ethical implications of their measurements.

• The Menlo Report on ethical considerations for network research

• The Allman/Paxson IMC 2017 paper on ethically sharing data and using others’ data

Submission guidelines

All submissions must satisfy the following requirements:

• Full papers: up to 13 pages for technical content (including appendices) + unlimited pages for references
• Short papers: up to 6 pages for technical content (including appendices) + unlimited pages for references
• 10-point font for main text; font used in other places (e.g., figures) should be no smaller than 9 point
• two-column format, with the size of each column being at most 3.33 x 9.25 inches and the space between columns being at least 0.33 inches letter page size (8.5 x 11 inches)
• double-blind: per the anonymity guidelines, all submissions must remove names, affiliations, and any identifying information

Submissions that do not comply with these requirements will be rejected without review. The new ACM template style file satisfies the formatting requirements, provided you compile your source with options that produce letter page size and 10-point fonts. The following settings in your LaTeX source should achieve that (but please verify the output):

\documentclass[10pt,sigconf,letterpaper,anonymous]{acmart}

As an example, we also provide the Latex CoNext18 template for ACM conference proceedings, which you can make use of.

Submission Site

Please submit your paper at https://imc19.hotcrp.com/.

Important Dates

IMC 2019 Shadow PC

To provide an educational experience by exposing students to a review process and to subsequently train the next generation of program committee (PC) members, the ACM IMC 2019 TPC would like to make submitted papers available to the shadow PC. Shadow PCs allow students and others interested in future PC service to read submitted papers and go through the reviewing process, ultimately arriving at a shadow conference program. This opportunity allows future PC members to learn first-hand about the peer-review process and gain experience as a reviewer.

The shadow PC process is run on a different system and the shadow PC reviewers will not have any access to the real reviews, the names of the real reviewers, or any other data such as relative rankings. Shadow PC reviewers will have to abide by the same rules and restrictions applicable to regular PC members. This includes, but is not limited to, rules against discussing the papers outside of the PC context, or using in any way results from reviewed papers before such papers have been published. Delegated reviews (i.e., external reviews) are not allowed for the shadow PC.

Shadow PC Chairs (contact: imc19shadowtpcchairs@lists.fu-berlin.de)

More information is available here.