Message from the Technical Program Committee Chairs
Sonia Fahmy Baochun Li John Lui
Shiwen Mao
On behalf of the technical program committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to Hong Kong for the 34th IEEE INFOCOM Conference. As has been the tradition for the conference, INFOCOM 2015 continues to feature a high-quality technical program across a wide range of research areas in computer communications and networking. In keeping with its long history, IEEE INFOCOM 2015 has been fortunate to receive 1640 papers, of which 316 were accepted to the main technical program after a thorough review process. The competitive acceptance rate of 19% reflects the prestige and popularity of INFOCOM to our research community. The papers included in this year’s program represent the forefront of networking research, as they explore important new ideas and directions in the field.
This year, for the first time in the history of INFOCOM, all submitted papers were reviewed in a double-blind fashion. The Technical Program Committee of INFOCOM 2015 has 46 Area Chairs and over 400 members, from a wide variety of academic, industrial, and research organizations around the globe. Over 5,000 reviews have been written, with each paper receiving at least 3, and as many as 6, reviews. Based on extensive online discussions, 126 papers were accepted before the TPC meeting, whereas 365 papers were discussed in-person at the TPC meeting, held in Philadelphia, PA, on November 8th, 2014. As a result of discussions during the TPC meeting, an additional 190 papers have been accepted to the main technical program.
In order to improve the accuracy of assigning over 1600 papers to over 400 TPC members for review, we have introduced a new automated review assignment system, implemented from scratch this year to replace randomized or claim-based assignment systems used in previous years. In the new system, TPC members submit their co-authored papers that are representative of their research expertise, which together with the submitted papers, are analyzed with Latent Semantic Indexing on a full-text basis to compute pair-wise similarity scores between TPC members and submitted papers. The matrix of similarity scores is used as input to a linear program solver to find a globally optimal matching that maximizes the total similarity score across the board.
This year, one third of the reviews have been manually assigned by the Area Chairs, and the remainder assigned by our new review assignment system. Statistical and anecdotal evidence has suggested that the overall reviewer expertise has increased by a substantial margin, and the overall quality of reviews has improved as a result.
With over 5,000 reviews written, the review process reflected a significant amount of voluntary effort and commitment from the entire community on networking research. Another major innovation this year was the introduction of a new process for rating the quality of reviews, in order to better recognize the effort and commitment from the community. 101 TPC members were recognized as “Distinguished Member of the 2015 IEEE INFOCOM Technical Program Committee,” based upon peer ratings among the TPC members and promptness in meeting the deadlines.
Besides the main technical program, there are twelve workshops and two panels on emerging research topics. We are especially pleased to have Professor Wei Zhao from the University of Macau deliver the plenary keynote speech. In addition, three demo and three poster sessions will be presented throughout the three-day conference, and a special student activity program is scheduled on Sunday, April 26, the day before the workshops. Finally, three prestigious awards will be presented as the conference opens: the INFOCOM Achievement Award, the INFOCOM Best Paper Award, as well as the INFOCOM Test of Time Award, newly introduced this year.
For a conference the size of INFOCOM, a high-quality technical program would not be possible without countless hours of hard work from many researchers in the community. We would like to thank all Area TPC chairs, TPC members, and external reviewers for their outstanding dedication and hard work. We would like to thank the conference general chair, Professor Jiannong Cao, and the steering committee chair, Professor Tom Hou and his committee, for their continuous leadership, support and guidance, especially given the significant changes to the paper submission and review assignment processes that we introduced this year. We are grateful to our TPC meeting arrangement chair, Professor Jie Wu, for his time and tireless effort in ensuring a smooth TPC meeting in downtown Philadelphia, which had more attendees than many conferences! We are also grateful of the hard work of our panel co-chairs, Professors Min Song and Tilman Wolf, for organizing two excellent and timely panels; our poster and demo co-chairs, Professors Chuan Wu and Kaushik Chowdhury, for putting together a total of six poster and demo sessions; as well as our workshop co-chairs, Professors Yingying Chen, Dan Wang, and My Thai, for organizing the twelve workshops on Monday, April 27.
In addition, we would like to convey our appreciation to members of the award committees, in particular Professors Ness Shroff, Jim Kurose, and T.V. Lakshman on the Achievement Award committee, as well as Professors Lavy Libman, Zhili Zhang, and Giuseppe Bianchi on the Best Paper Award Committee, for their dedicated work on the finest detail in the award selection process. We would like to thank Professor Lavy Libman for his valuable assistance on testing early implementations of the review assignment system, so that important design decisions can be made. We would like to thank Xuefeng Liu, Web Chair, for his significant work on the conference website. Our thanks also go to Ms. Debora Kingston, IEEE Communications Society, for her invaluable assistance in coordinating various IEEE related activities. Last but not the least, we would like to thank the authors for their continuing support in submitting their hard work and original contributions to this conference.
We hope that you enjoy the technical program, as well as the overall experience of attending IEEE INFOCOM in Hong Kong!
Sonia Fahmy, Baochun Li, John Lui
IEEE INFOCOM 2015 TPC Co-Chairs
Shiwen Mao
IEEE INFOCOM 2015 TPC Vice Chair — Information Systems
Sonia Fahmy Baochun Li John Lui
Shiwen Mao
On behalf of the technical program committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to Hong Kong for the 34th IEEE INFOCOM Conference. As has been the tradition for the conference, INFOCOM 2015 continues to feature a high-quality technical program across a wide range of research areas in computer communications and networking. In keeping with its long history, IEEE INFOCOM 2015 has been fortunate to receive 1640 papers, of which 316 were accepted to the main technical program after a thorough review process. The competitive acceptance rate of 19% reflects the prestige and popularity of INFOCOM to our research community. The papers included in this year’s program represent the forefront of networking research, as they explore important new ideas and directions in the field.
This year, for the first time in the history of INFOCOM, all submitted papers were reviewed in a double-blind fashion. The Technical Program Committee of INFOCOM 2015 has 46 Area Chairs and over 400 members, from a wide variety of academic, industrial, and research organizations around the globe. Over 5,000 reviews have been written, with each paper receiving at least 3, and as many as 6, reviews. Based on extensive online discussions, 126 papers were accepted before the TPC meeting, whereas 365 papers were discussed in-person at the TPC meeting, held in Philadelphia, PA, on November 8th, 2014. As a result of discussions during the TPC meeting, an additional 190 papers have been accepted to the main technical program.
In order to improve the accuracy of assigning over 1600 papers to over 400 TPC members for review, we have introduced a new automated review assignment system, implemented from scratch this year to replace randomized or claim-based assignment systems used in previous years. In the new system, TPC members submit their co-authored papers that are representative of their research expertise, which together with the submitted papers, are analyzed with Latent Semantic Indexing on a full-text basis to compute pair-wise similarity scores between TPC members and submitted papers. The matrix of similarity scores is used as input to a linear program solver to find a globally optimal matching that maximizes the total similarity score across the board.
This year, one third of the reviews have been manually assigned by the Area Chairs, and the remainder assigned by our new review assignment system. Statistical and anecdotal evidence has suggested that the overall reviewer expertise has increased by a substantial margin, and the overall quality of reviews has improved as a result.
With over 5,000 reviews written, the review process reflected a significant amount of voluntary effort and commitment from the entire community on networking research. Another major innovation this year was the introduction of a new process for rating the quality of reviews, in order to better recognize the effort and commitment from the community. 101 TPC members were recognized as “Distinguished Member of the 2015 IEEE INFOCOM Technical Program Committee,” based upon peer ratings among the TPC members and promptness in meeting the deadlines.
Besides the main technical program, there are twelve workshops and two panels on emerging research topics. We are especially pleased to have Professor Wei Zhao from the University of Macau deliver the plenary keynote speech. In addition, three demo and three poster sessions will be presented throughout the three-day conference, and a special student activity program is scheduled on Sunday, April 26, the day before the workshops. Finally, three prestigious awards will be presented as the conference opens: the INFOCOM Achievement Award, the INFOCOM Best Paper Award, as well as the INFOCOM Test of Time Award, newly introduced this year.
For a conference the size of INFOCOM, a high-quality technical program would not be possible without countless hours of hard work from many researchers in the community. We would like to thank all Area TPC chairs, TPC members, and external reviewers for their outstanding dedication and hard work. We would like to thank the conference general chair, Professor Jiannong Cao, and the steering committee chair, Professor Tom Hou and his committee, for their continuous leadership, support and guidance, especially given the significant changes to the paper submission and review assignment processes that we introduced this year. We are grateful to our TPC meeting arrangement chair, Professor Jie Wu, for his time and tireless effort in ensuring a smooth TPC meeting in downtown Philadelphia, which had more attendees than many conferences! We are also grateful of the hard work of our panel co-chairs, Professors Min Song and Tilman Wolf, for organizing two excellent and timely panels; our poster and demo co-chairs, Professors Chuan Wu and Kaushik Chowdhury, for putting together a total of six poster and demo sessions; as well as our workshop co-chairs, Professors Yingying Chen, Dan Wang, and My Thai, for organizing the twelve workshops on Monday, April 27.
In addition, we would like to convey our appreciation to members of the award committees, in particular Professors Ness Shroff, Jim Kurose, and T.V. Lakshman on the Achievement Award committee, as well as Professors Lavy Libman, Zhili Zhang, and Giuseppe Bianchi on the Best Paper Award Committee, for their dedicated work on the finest detail in the award selection process. We would like to thank Professor Lavy Libman for his valuable assistance on testing early implementations of the review assignment system, so that important design decisions can be made. We would like to thank Xuefeng Liu, Web Chair, for his significant work on the conference website. Our thanks also go to Ms. Debora Kingston, IEEE Communications Society, for her invaluable assistance in coordinating various IEEE related activities. Last but not the least, we would like to thank the authors for their continuing support in submitting their hard work and original contributions to this conference.
We hope that you enjoy the technical program, as well as the overall experience of attending IEEE INFOCOM in Hong Kong!
Sonia Fahmy, Baochun Li, John Lui
IEEE INFOCOM 2015 TPC Co-Chairs
Shiwen Mao
IEEE INFOCOM 2015 TPC Vice Chair — Information Systems