Highlights

• Distinctive selection procedure
• Innovative review disclosure
• ICE welcomes full papers to be included in the proceedings
• ICE also welcomes oral communications of already published or preliminary work
• Submission deadlines: April 6 April 20 (Extended)
• Invited talks: Elvira Albert, Silvia Crafa, Alexey Gotsman
• Publication in EPTCS
• Special issue in the Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming (Elsevier) (to be confirmed)

Scope

Interaction and Concurrency Experiences (ICEs) is a series of international scientific meetings oriented to theoretical computer science researchers with special interest in models, verification, tools, and programming primitives for complex interactions.

The general scope of the venue includes theoretical and applied aspects of interactions and the synchronization mechanisms used among components of concurrent/distributed systems, related to several areas of computer science in the broad spectrum ranging from formal specification and analysis to studies inspired by emerging computational models.

We solicit contributions relevant to Interaction and Concurrency, including but not limited to:

• Formal semantics
• Process algebras and calculi
• Models and languages
• Protocols
• Logics and types
• Expressiveness
• Model transformations
• Tools, implementations, and experiments
• Specification and verification
• Coinductive techniques
• Tools and techniques for automation
• Synthesis techniques

Selection Procedure

Since its first edition in 2008, the distinguishing feature of ICE has been an innovative paper selection mechanism based on an interactive, friendly, and constructive discussion amongst authors and PC members in an online forum.

During the review phase, each submission is published in a dedicated discussion forum. The discussion forum can be accessed by the authors of the submission and by all PC members not in conflict with the submission (the forum preserves anonymity). The forum is used by reviewers to ask questions, clarifications, and modifications from the authors, allowing them better to explain and to improve all aspects of their submission. The evaluation of the submission will take into account not only the reviews, but also the outcome of the discussion.

As witnessed by the past eight editions of ICE, this procedure considerably improves the accuracy of the reviews, the fairness of the selection, the quality of camera-ready papers, and the discussion during the workshop.

Since 2017, we are adopting a light double-blind reviewing process, detailed below.

Submission Guidelines

We invite two types of submissions:

• Research papers, original contributions that will be published in the workshop post-proceedings. Research papers must not be simultaneously submitted to other conferences/workshops with refereed proceedings. The page limit for research papers is 16 pages + 2 pages of references.
• Oral communications, that will be presented at the workshop, but will not appear in the post-proceedings. This type of contribution includes e.g. previously published contributions, preliminary work, and position papers. There is no strict page limit for this kind of submission but submissions of at most five pages would be appreciated. A one page summary of previously published work also perfectly fits this category.

Authors of research papers must omit their names and institutions from the title page, they should refer to their other work in the third person and omit acknowledgements that could reveal their identity or affiliation. The purpose is to avoid any bias based on authors’ identity characteristics, such as gender, seniority, or nationality, in the review process. Our goal is to facilitate an unbiased approach to reviewing by supporting reviewers’ access to works that do not carry obvious references to the authors’ identities. As mentioned above, this is a lightweight double-blind process. Anonymization should not be a heavy burden for authors, and should not make papers weaker or more difficult to review. Advertising the paper on alternate forums (e.g., on a personal web-page, pre-print archive, email, talks, discussions with colleagues) is permitted, and authors will not be penalized by for such advertisement.

Papers in the “Communications” category need not be anonymized. For any questions concerning the double blind process, feel free to consult the ICEcreamers.

We are keen to enhance the balanced, inclusive and diverse nature of the ICE community, and would particularly encourage female colleagues and members of other underrepresented groups to submit their work.

Submissions must be made electronically in PDF format via: EasyChair.

Publications

Accepted research papers and communications must be presented at the workshop by one of the authors.

Accepted research papers will be published after the workshop in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science.

We plan to invite authors of selected papers and brief announcements to submit their work in a special issue in the Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming (Elsevier). Such contributions will be regularly peer-reviewed according to the standard journal policy, but they will be handled in a shorter time than regular submissions. A list of published and in preparation special issues of previous ICE editions is reported below.

Invited Speakers

• Elvira Albert (Complutense University of Madrid)
Title: Constrained DPOR: Avoiding redundancies in the exploration of concurrent programs
Abstract: Verification and testing of concurrent programs is challenged by the combinatorial explosion that arises by considering all possible ways in which processes/threads can interleave. Partial Order Reduction (POR) techniques avoid redundancies in the exploration of concurrent programs based on the idea that two interleavings can be considered equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by swapping adjacent, independent execution steps. This talk will overview recent context-sensitive, constrained, dynamic POR techniques incorporated in the SYCO system, a SYstematic testing tool for COncurrent programs. We will also describe recent applications of SYCO to verify Software-Defined Networks.
Bio: Elvira Albert is an Associate Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, where she leads the COSTA team (http://costa.fdi.ucm.es). The research in the COSTA team is focused on formal techniques and models for optimizing, verifying and understanding programs, and related implementation technology. Recent work has been centered on the development of automatic tools for proving program termination and inferring the resource consumption of executing programs, as well as leveraging these techniques to a concurrent and distributed setting. Elvira has published more than 100 papers on these topics in international journals and conferences.

• Silvia Crafa (Università di Padova)
Title: From the parts to the whole; formal methods in action
Abstract: I will present a couple of research projects showing how Concurrency -and Interaction, which is its key ingredient- is addressed at different abstraction levels, ranging from the epistemic level to the programming primitives. We will see concurrency theory in action in modelling a financial system, in choosing a framework for programming the behaviour of interactive entities, and in formally reasoning about a system of concurrent objects.
Bio: Silvia Crafa is assistant professor at University of Padova, where she teaches Concurrent Programming and Advanced Topics in Programming Languages. She is member of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Working Group n.1.8: Concurrency Theory since September 2012. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from University of Bologna and her thesis has been awarded by the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. She is member of the Italian Laboratory on Informatics and Society and member of the Informatics Europe and ACM Europe Working Group on Ethics and Automated Decision-Systems. Her research focuses on the semantic foundations and the static analysis of concurrent and distributed systems, and more recently on interdisciplinary topics related to epistemic aspects of computer science and the analysis of the social impact of new technologies.

• Alexey Gotsman (IMDEA, Madrid)
Title: Reasoning about Consistency Choices in Modern Distributed Systems
Abstract: Distributed systems underlying large-scale Internet services often guarantee immediate availability and tolerate network failures at the expense of providing only weak data consistency guarantees. This is compensated for by new programming constructs, such as replicated data types (aka CRDTs) and novel forms of transactions. Navigating the spectrum of possible consistency models and programming constructs is far from trivial. I will survey recent developments that help in this: formal definitions of consistency model semantics and methods for reasoning about how the weakness of consistency models affects the correctness of applications using them.​
Bio: Alexey Gotsman is an Associate Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK. He has received best paper awards at PODC and CONCUR and the Best Dissertation Award of the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems. He is currently a holder of an ERC Starting Grant. Alexey's research interests are in methods and tools for developing correct concurrent and distributed software.

ICEcreamers

• Massimo Bartoletti (University of Cagliari, IT; PC co-chair)
• Laura Bocchi (University of Kent, UK)
• Ludovic Henrio (CNRS, Sophia Antipolis, FR)
• Sophia Knight (Uppsala University, SE; PC co-chair)

Program Committee

1. Rabéa Ameur-Boulifa (MINES ParisTech, FR)
2. Lacramioara Astefanoaei (Technical University of Munich, DE)
3. Eduard Baranov (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH)
4. Stefano Calzavara (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, IT)
5. Tzu-Chun Chen (TU Darmstadt, DE)
6. Matteo Cimini (Indiana University, USA)
7. Tiziana Cimoli (University of Cagliari, IT)
8. Corina Cirstea (University of Southampton, UK)
9. Ornela Dardha (University of Glasgow, UK)
10. Ramunas Gutkovas (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, PT)
11. Michell Guzmán (LIX-École Polytechnique, FR)
12. Tobias Heindel (University of Copenhagen, DK)
13. Nils Jansen (Radboud University Nijmegen, NL)
14. Christos Kloukinas (City University London, UK)
15. Ivan Lanese (University of Bologna, IT)
16. Alberto Lluch Lafuente (Technical University of Denmark, DK)
17. Julien Lange (Imperial College London, UK)
18. Michael Lienhardt (University of Turin, IT)
19. Jean Marie Madiot (INRIA Paris, FR)
20. Anastasia Mavridou (Vanderbilt University Nashville, US)
21. Hernán Melgratti (University of Buenos Aires, AR)
22. Claudio Mezzina (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, IT)
23. Dominic Orchard (University of Kent, UK)
24. Jorge A. Perez (University of Groningen, NL)
25. Kristin Peters (TU Berlin, DE)
26. Johannes Åman Pohjola (Chalmers University, SE)
27. Matteo Sammartino (University College London, UK)
28. Alceste Scalas (Imperial College London, UK)
29. Ana Sokolova (University of Salzburg, AT)
30. Hugo Torres Vieira (IMT Lucca, IT)
31. Valeria Vignudelli (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, FR)
32. Roberto Zunino (University of Trento, IT)

Important dates