The goal of the New and Emerging Ideas (NEMI) track at ICSA 2018 is to encourage the software architecture community to propose radical new software architecture research visions and ideas, which can challenge the status quo of the software discipline and point to new directions.

Types of submissions

To support that goal, the NEMI 2018 track will publish two kinds of papers:

New Ideas (4 pages):

  • Visions of new directions supported by a strong and well motivated scientific intuition or use-inspiration;
  • Bold arguments against current research directions and results;
  • Results that challenge established results or beliefs giving evidence that call for fundamentally new directions, open up new research avenues where software architecture research can contribute.
  • Radically new approaches, techniques, or theories that can bring new results to a field of research;

Emerging results (4 pages):

  • Not yet fully mature research results, that may lack full validation but still that can stimulate discussions. Emerging results papers should trigger discussion and raise awareness and reflection on specific topics, in research and/or industrial practice.

NEMI papers must clearly motivate and illustrate a rationale for changing current practice and/or research in software architecture. Note that evaluation results are not required for NEMI papers (but if such results exist, then they may be presented, if only to give the reviewers a feel about the evaluation plan). Strong argumentation and reasoning is expected to inspire the readers.

Scope

NEMI provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking research in software architecture in order to accelerate the exposure of the community to early yet promising and potentially inspiring research efforts.

NEMI papers are not second-class ICSA research track papers. NEMI is a forum for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated research directions and emerging results.

In principle, the track addresses the same topics of interest as those of the technical research paper track. However, NEMI authors are encouraged to combine these topics in new ways, to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software architecture, push the boundaries of software architecture research to new avenues, as well as to argue for the importance of software architecture research in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of scope

A NEMI submission should not be just incremental results on existing research, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results. ICSA conference have several tracks and workshops where incremental results, validated research and industry-relevant results are well suited for.

Evaluation

All papers will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria:

  • Value: the problem is worth exploring, ideally real world use-inspired.
  • Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice;
  • Scope: software architecture related topics that can impact software engineering practice
  • Originality: new insight;
  • Rationale: soundness of the rationale and argumentation;
  • Evaluation: appropriate consideration of relevant literature and/or research evaluation to demonstrate originality and arguments.

Formatting and Submission Instructions

All NEMI submissions must conform to the Author Instructions, and must not exceed four pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. NEMI is not double blind. All papers are to be submitted electronically via the NEMI EasyChair submission system, by the submission deadline, and must not have been published before.

Note that authors of accepted papers may also submit a poster describing their work.

Important dates

  • Abstracts (mandatory) due: Mar 8, 2018
  • Papers due:  Mar 15, 2018
  • Papers notification: Apr 5, 2018
  • Camera-ready due: Apr 12, 2018

Publication and Attendance

All accepted contributions will be published in ICSA 2018 Companion proceedings, and appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. At least one author of an accepted contribution is required to register and present the work at the conference. ICSA 2018 will ensure that all papers accepted can be presented regardless of US immigration rules.

Organization

For more information please contact the NEMI Track chairs:

  • Ipek Ozkaya (Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, USA) – ozkaya(at)sei.cmu.edu
  • Liming Zhu (Data61 | CSIRO, Australia) – Liming.Zhu(at)data61.csiro.au