Call for Proposals Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions at DSN 2008:

We are pleased to announce that the 2008 Dependable Systems and Networks Symposium (DSN 2008) will, for the first time, feature "Birds of a Feather" sessions, to be held on Wednesday evening, June 25, 2008.

A Birds of a Feather (BoF) session provides a gathering place and discussion forum for those interested in the same issues and concepts. BoFs can be organized for sharing ideas on the specific topics, narrow or broad.

These are not workshops or sessions where people present papers, but open, "brainstorming" forums for attendees who want to get together with others to share their current interests, goals, technology, environment, or backgrounds.

BoFs are popular because of their interactive and flexible format and the fact that they offer attendees and technology experts an opportunity to interact at a peer level.

If you want to organize and run a Birds of a Feather session, please send me a descriptive proposal by 7 April 2008.

Topics will be evaluated on the basis of their promise to engage a significant number of the conferences participants in a fruitful discussion. Possible examples include:

1. Reliability and security of critical infrastructures, e.g., power grid
2. Multi-core processor architectures: opportunities and challenges from the reliability and security perspective
3. Virtual machines: reliability and performance tradeoffs or how to avoid virtual machines to become a single point of failure?
4. Fault-tolerance challenges in large server clusters
5. Adaptation and self-organization in ubiquitous computing

While we would welcome BOF organizers for the above topics, the purpose of this CFP is to ask *you* to propose topics around which a community of interested researchers would coalesce at DSN. We are explicitly not looking for marketing or recruiting sessions; however, commercial entities are encouraged to propose sessions on current technical issues.

Bob Swarz:
Email: rswarz@mitre.org
Telephone: +1 781-271-2847
Fax: +1 508-258-1124