Call For Papers, ACM IMC 2020, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

The Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) is a highly selective venue for the presentation of measurement-based research in data communications. The focus of IMC 2020 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)
• measurement-based 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
• systems and algorithms that build on measurement-based findings
• advances in data collection, analysis, and storage (e.g., anonymization, querying, sharing)
• reappraisal of previous empirical network measurements and measurement-based conclusions
• descriptions of challenges and future directions the measurement community should pursue

Networks of interest include:

• Internet transit networks
• edge networks, including home networks, broadband access networks (e.g., cable, fiber), and cellular networks
• data center networks and cloud computing infrastructure
• peer-to-peer, overlay, and content distribution networks
• software-defined networks
• online social networks
• online services, platforms, and content providers
• experimental networks, prototype networks, and future Internetworks

Authors unsure about topical fit are welcome to contact the program committee co-chairs at imc2020pcchairs@sigcomm.org.

Review process and criteria

IMC 2020 invites two forms of submissions:

• Full papers (up to 13 pages for text and figures + unlimited pages for references and appendix) 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 and appendix) 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 submit only 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 2020 will bestow two awards on paper submissions, (1) a Best Paper award; and (2) 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 new dataset, source code distribution, open platform, or other noteworthy service to the community.

To be eligible for the community award, the authors must make data or source code publicly available or have a software artifact that is accessible and usable by the public at the time of 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.

A few accepted papers may be forwarded for fast-track submission to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

Early Rejection

The review process will have several reviewing rounds. To allow authors time to improve their work and submit to other venues, authors of submissions for which there is a consensus on rejection will be notified early.

Anonymity Guidelines

Authors are expected to make a good-faith effort to anonymize papers. As an author, you should not identify yourself in the paper either explicitly or by implication (e.g., through the references).

Anonymization of important details are not required, if they are critical for the evaluation of the paper. For example, system names may be left de-anonymized, if the system name is important for a reviewer to be able to evaluate the work, and the paper may point to existing public datasets and artifacts that highlight or underscore the contributions outlined in the paper.

Please follow 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, unless the previous work provides important context for evaluation of the existing contribution (e.g., the paper describes an implementation or deployment of a method previously developed by the same authors).

Additional details on paper anonymity are available here and in the statement released by the IMC Steering Committee here.

Ethics

Research involving experiments with human subjects or user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information) should adhere to community norms. Any work that raises potential ethics considerations should indicate this on the submission form. The basic principles of ethical research are outlined in the Belmont Report: (1) respect for persons (which may involve obtaining consent); (2) beneficence (a careful consideration of risks and benefits); and (3) justice (ensuring that parts of the population that bear the risks of the research also are poised to obtain some benefit from it).

Research involving human subjects must be approved by the researchers’ respective Institutional Review Boards before the research takes place. Authors should indicate on the submission form whether the work involves human subjects, and, if so, if an IRB protocol has been approved for the research. We also expect that any research follows the practices and procedures of the institution(s) where the work is being carried out; for example, some universities require separate approval for the use of campus data. We expect researchers to abide by these protocols.

Some research does not involve human subjects yet nonetheless raises questions of ethics, which may be wide-ranging and not necessarily limited to direct effects. We encourage authors to be mindful of the ethics of the research that they undertake; these considerations are often not clear-cut, but often warrant thoughtful consideration. The program committee may raise concerns around the ethics of the work, and so we ask authors to outline these considerations explicitly in a separate appendix section (clearly marked with an appendix section heading “Ethics”), and when appropriate for context, in the body of the paper. The submission form will include a way to alert reviewers of this additional material.

Additionally, the program committee reserves the right to conduct additional evaluations and reviews of research ethics and reserves the right to independent judgment concerning the ethics of the conducted research.

Contact the program committee co-chairs at imc2020pcchairs@sigcomm.org if you have any questions.

Submission guidelines

All submissions must satisfy the following requirements:

• Full papers: up to 13 pages for technical content + unlimited pages for references and appendix
• Short papers: up to 6 pages for technical content + unlimited pages for references and appendix

Formatting should be as follows:

• 10-point font for main text. Fonts used in other elements of the paper (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)

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 a sample template for ACM conference proceedings, which you can make use of.

Important Dates

Considering the challenges we all face at this time, the TPC chairs have decided to extend the paper registration and submission deadline by one week. Please note the changed dates. Beyond this, if you are an author who has been directly affected by the disease, please do not hesitate to contact the chairs directly at imc2020pcchairs@sigcomm.org.

Submission Site

Please submit your paper at https://imc2020.hotcrp.com/.