Message from the General Chair and Program Chairs

2021 2021 IEEE 41st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)  
Welcome to the 41st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2021). The conference, originally planned to be held in Washington DC, United States, is happening virtually due to the pandemic. Continuing with the ICDCS tradition, the conference program consists of the main conference and a number of workshops. The main conference has 12 research tracks that include two new tracks based on timely topics of interest to the community: Machine learning on or for
more » ... d Systems and Insights from Industrial Experience. We received a total of 489 paper submissions to the research tracks of the main conference. In the context of the difficulties introduced by the pandemic, such a number demonstrates the status of ICDCS as a leading conference in distributed computing systems. The program committee had 360 members. The program committee thoroughly reviewed all the submissions with help from 205 external reviewers. Each paper got at least three reviews, with a total of 2372 reviews. The program chairs and vice-chairs had online discussions and a virtual PC meeting to deliberate and select the accepted papers. The selection was very competitive. We accepted 97 papers (19.84% acceptance rate). In addition, the Demonstration and Poster track accepted 23 papers. As for the workshops, there are a total of 10 papers appearing in workshops on timely topics. The conference also celebrates researchers that have had a large impact on our community. The Award Committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP) has selected Dr. Dahlia Malkhi to receive this year's TCDP Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. Dr. Malkhi will deliver a keynote talk at the conference. In addition, we are delighted that Prof. John Ousterhout and Prof. Bruce Maggs have accepted our invitations to give keynote talks at the conference. With the COVID-19 pandemic looming large in our lives for more than a year, organizing a conference is more challenging than usual. We want to express our sincere appreciation to all the program vice-chairs, program committee members, and external reviewers for their outstanding efforts and contributions. We would also like to thank all the other organizers, including poster and demo chairs (Drs. Anne-Cécile Orgerie and Sheng Wei), publicity chairs (Drs.
doi:10.1109/icdcs51616.2021.00005 fatcat:j3v5dbrxgnhzlaj3zrgtgjjisi