• Cloud, fog, edge computing and data centers
• Data-intensive computing (big data) and data analytics
• Mobile devices and services
• Ubiquitous and pervasive computing
• Networking, network function virtualization, software-defined networking
• Internet applications and multimedia
• Internet-of-Things, cyber-physical systems, smart cities
• Machine learning

Systems and Engineering Issues:

• Scalability and performance
• Reliability and fault tolerance
• Consistency, availability, and replication
• Blockchain, Security and privacy
• Virtualization, auto-scaling, provisioning, and scheduling
• Real-time solutions and quality-of-service
• Energy- and power-aware techniques

Design Principles and Programming Support:

• Programming abstractions and paradigms for middleware
• Methodologies and tools for the design, implementation, verification, and evaluation
• Event-based, publish/subscribe, and peer-to-peer solutions
• Reconfigurable, adaptable, and reflective approaches
• Reviews of middleware paradigms, e.g., object models, aspect orientation, etc.

Original papers of three types are sought:

• Research Papers: These papers report original research on the above topics, and will be evaluated on significance of the problem, novelty of the solution, advancement beyond prior work, sufficient supporting evidence and clarity of the presentation.
• Experimentation and Deployment Papers: These papers describe complete systems, platforms, and/or comprehensive experimental evaluations of alternative designs and solutions to well-known problems. The emphasis during the evaluation of these papers will be less on the novelty and more on the demonstrated usefulness and potential impact of the contributions, the extensive experimentation involved, and the quality and weight of the lessons learned.
• Big Ideas Papers: These are papers that have the potential for opening up new research directions. For such papers, the potential to motivate new research is more important than full experimental evaluation, though some preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of the approach or idea is important.

Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers must have at most 12 pages of technical content, including text, figures, and appendices, but excluding any number of additional pages for bibliographic references. Note that submissions must be double-blind: authors' names must not appear, and authors must make a good faith attempt to anonymize their submissions. Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM style, which can found on the submission page, and should clearly indicate the paper type on the first page.

The Middleware 2018 conference proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date will be the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library which may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the Middleware conference. Note that the official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

The authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit supporting materials to be made publicly available as “source materials” in the ACM Digital Library. The materials will be vetted by the Artifact Availability Evaluation process run by a separate committee. This submission is voluntary but encouraged and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers. Papers that go through the Artifact Availability Evaluation process successfully and are made available in the ACM Digital Library will receive a badge printed on the papers themselves.

General chair
Guillaume Pierre, Univ. Rennes, France

Program Chairs 
Liuba Shrira, Brandeis University, USA
Paulo Ferreira, Univ. Lisbon, Portugal

Industry track chairs
Lydia Chen, IBM Research, Switzerland
Erwan Le Merrer, Technicolor R&D, France
Workshops/tutorials chairs
Mohammad Sadoghi, UC Davis, USA
Spyros Voulgaris, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Doctoral symposium chairs
Laurent Réveillère, Université de Bordeaux
Luís Veiga, Technical univ. Lisbon, Portugal
Test-of-Time award chair
Nalini Venkatasubramanian , University of California, Irvine, USA
Sponsor chair
Christine Morin, Inria, France
Local arrangements chair
David Bromberg, Univ. Rennes, France
Proceedings chair
Kaveh Razavi, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Communication chair
François Taïani, Univ. Rennes, France
Web and social media chair
Benjamin Camus, Univ. Rennes / Inria, France
Publicity chairs
Saurabh Bagchi, Purdue university, USA
Benjamin Camus, Univ. Rennes / Inria, France
Mina Sedaghat, Ericsson, Sweden
Student activities chair
Timothy Wood, George Washington University, USA
Program Committees
Atoll Adya (Google), Sonia Ben Mokhtar (LIRIS-CNRS, France), Primed Bhatotia (University of Edinburgh), Annette Bieniutsa (University of Kaiserslautern), Gordon Blair (Lancaster University, UK), Björn B. Brandenburg (MPI-SWS), Yerom David Bromberg (University of Rennes/IRISA), Roy Campbell (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA), Jeff  Chase (Duke University), Dilma De Silva (TAMU), Fred Douglas (Vencore Labs), Aleksandr Dragojevic (Microsoft research), Patrick Eugster (Purdue University, USA), David Eyers (University of Otago, New Zeland), Pascal Felber (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Roy Friedman (Technion, Isarel), Anshul Gandhi (Stony Brook University), Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL, Switzerland), Daniel Hagimont (Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France), Valerie Issarny (Inria, France), Wouter Joosen (KU Leuven, Belgium), Flavio Junqueira (Confluent, USA), Jayaram K. R. (IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA), Reedier Kapitza (TU Braunschweig, Germany), Fabio Kon (University of São Paulo, Brazil), Orran Krieger (Boston University), Jean-Pierre Lozi (Université Nice, Sophia Antipolis, France), Diego F. Lugones (Nokia Bell Labs), Dejan Milojicic (Hewlett Packard Labs, USA), José Orlando (Universidade do Minho, Portugal), Marta  Patiño (Technical University of Madrid, Spain), Peter Pietzuch (Imperial Collge, London, UK), Robbert van Renesse (Cornell Univ.), Laurent Reveillere (Bordeaux INP, France), Etienne Rivière (Université catholique de Louvain), Mohammad Sadoghi (UC Davis), Marc Shapiro (Inria/UPMC-LIP6, France), Thorsten Strufe (Technical Univ.of Dresden), Francois Taïani (Université de Rennes 1/IRISA/ESIR, INRIA, France), Gaël  Thomas (Telecom SudParis, Paris, France), Luis Veiga (University of Lisbon), Nailing Venkatasubramanian (University of California, Irvine, USA), Spyros Voulgaris (University of Economics and Business (AUEB)), Marko Vukolić (IBM Research Zurich, Switzerland)