Workshop Report: HotDep 2013 - The 9th workshop on hot topics in dependable systems

HotDep 2013 was held November 3, 2013 in Farmington, PA, co-located with the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. HotDep targets cutting-edge research ideas spanning the domains of systems and fault tolerance, drawing from the two associated research communities (i.e., researchers who attend traditional “dependability” conference, and those who attend“systems”conferences). The workshop is intended to build links between the two communities and serve as a forum for sharing ideas and challenges. More information about the HotDep workshop series is available online at http://www.hotdep.org/. HotDep 2013 received 21 submissions from 11 countries world-wide. Co-chaired by Christian Cachin and Robbert van Renesse, a program committee of fifteen members provided each paper with three reviews and selected 11 papers (from 8 countries) for presentation. While this constitutes a high acceptance ratio of over 50%, we feel that the overall quality of the accepted papers was much higher than what this number suggests for an average conference or workshop. As we had actively solicited contributions as program chairs, the submitted sample has been well above average in terms of quality and interest. The papers represented a nice balance between papers from academia, from industry, and combined. All accepted papers are published in the ACM Digital Library. The workshop took place in one of the many nice conference rooms at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, which could be reached from the hotel lobby after following a convoluted sequence of hallways and stairs. The room gave a pretty view into the surrounding woodlands under the clear November sky. HotDep had 33 registered participants, but several people signed up for other workshops attended some of the talks as well and participated in the subsequent discussions. The audience peaked at close to 50 people during the keynote talk. 2. PROGRAM