EGC2015: Deadline extension and UK travel grants

Extended Call for Papers:
We still have generous travel grants for participants travelling from UK.
Please consider submitting an extended abstract.
** New deadline for participants requiring travel grant or visa: Sunday 25
January 2015, midnight Hawaii time.
** New deadline for local participants: Friday 30 January 2015, midnight
Hawaii time

Post-proceedings will be published in Springer's CCIS series (a sub-series
of LNCS).

Embracing Global Computing in Emerging Economies
26-28 February 2015, Almaty, Kazakhstan
http://emerging.kbtu.kz

This is a British Council funded workshop for promoting joint research in
computer science between Kazakhstan and United Kingdom. Travel grants,
worth up to £1000, are available for researchers having completed their PhD
within the past 10 years and PhD students, who are based in either United
Kingdom or in Kazakhstan. The workshop features post-proceeding in
Springer's CCIS series, and four invited speakers from UK and Russia.

Background:
Modern computing no longer takes place on a personal machine. Businesses
and private users alike are increasingly entrusting their data to Cloud
providers that run global networks of datacenters. These datacenters
provide the illusion of infinite resources available on demand at minimal
cost. Furthermore, Cloud providers absorb the risk of up front investment
in an IT infrastructure that is resilient to data loss, service outage, and
fluctuation in demand. Without a global network of datacenters, few
businesses would be able to deliver services that perform equally well in
London, San Francisco and Singapore.

Businesses in countries like Kazakhstan risk missing out on the competitive
edge given by tapping into this global network of datacenters. The nearest
datacenters to Almaty for major Cloud providers, such as Amazon, are in
Beijing and Frankfurt. This results in a visible impact on the performance
of service and reduced availability causing loss of customers.

To avoid emerging economies like Kazakhstan lagging behind in the push
toward global computing, several problems need to be addressed, not limited
to the following:
 - How do we address and overcome legal restrictions on where data from
public bodies are held? What are the obstacles to embracing Open Data?
 - How do we design systems that are resilient to natural disasters and
extreme weather? Can we cost effectively ensure that if a datacenter is
destroyed in an earthquake, then no data will be lost or become unavailable?
 - How can smaller local Cloud providers join a global network of Cloud
providers, sometimes called the Intercloud? Can Cloud brokers make
accessing computing resources easier for adopters?
 - How do we model services that run on a global network of datacenters.
How do the foundational models and semantics of systems change to
accurately reflect reality?
 - How do we design verification tools for checking that both the
infrastructure inside datacenters and services running across datacenters
are correct? Can we test systems running at small scale, to see how they
would behave at a big scale?
 - How do we deliver services to regions with almost no high bandwidth
channels. Can we optimise remote sessions such that a minimal amount of
information is transmitted over the expensive wide-area network.
 - How do we quantify the economic risk factors that are managed by
different Cloud providers? How do we model different work loads that a
system may be faced with.
 - How can emerging economies, such as Kazakhstan, take the lead in
innovation in global computing, where we see projects through from
foundational results to concrete applications.

We welcome technical papers addressing related topics in computer science.
We welcome: bold foundational non-incremental developments;
inter-disciplinary papers covering economic and environmental issues;
systems papers that describe and evaluate related systems; and, papers on
techniques, tools and methodologies.

Submissions:
Submissions should be a paper of up to 10 pages prepared according to
Springer's guidelines for the Communications in Computer and Information
Science (CCIS) series:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Papers should be submitted through EasyChair at the following address:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=egc20150

Papers will receive three reviews. Accepted papers will be published in the
workshop proceedings distributed at the event. Submission for the
post-proceedings will be one month after the workshop, giving participants
time to revise their work based on feedback. The full papers for the
post-proceeding will be reviewed again, to ensure that improvements have
been made. The post-proceedings will be published in Springer's
Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series.

We encourage papers where results are formally stated and proven and draw
on fundamental results in computer science. The best formally stated papers
will be invited for a special edition of Scientific Annals of Computer
Science (SACS). SACS is indexed by Scopus and DBLP.

Dates:
New deadline for participants requiring travel grants: Sunday 25 January,
midnight Hawaii time.
New deadline for local participants: Friday 30 January 2015, midnight
Hawaii time.
Notification: 1 February 2015
Workshop dates: 26-28 February 2015
Post-proceedings (full paper): 1 April 2015

Venue:
The workshop will be held in Kazakh-British Technical University, Tole Bi
59, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Local Organisers (Kazakhstan):
Ross Horne, Kazakh-British Technical University
Ken Charman, Kazakh-British Technical University

British Coordinators (United Kingdom):
Vladimiro Sassone, University of Southampton
Toby Wilkinson, University of Southampton

Invited Speakers:
Nikolay Shilov, A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics, Novosibirsk;
                and Nazarbayev University, Astana
Yehia Elkhatib, Lancaster University, UK
Gareth Tyson, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Sergey Khalyapin, Manager of Systems Engineers, Citrix RU&CIS
Andrey Andreev, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Kazakhstan

Program Committee:
Assel Akzhalova, Kazakh-British Technical University
Bogdan Aman, Romanian Academy of Sciences
Gabrielle Anderson, University College London
Lyazzat Atytmayeva, Kazakh-British Technical University
Bektur Baizhanov, Kazakh Academy of Sciences
Timur Bakibayev, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
Kenes Beketayev, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Gabriel Ciobanu, Newcastle University
Anuar Dussembaev, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
Yehia Elkhatib, Lancaster University
Mahmud Hassan, International IT University
Ross Horne, Kazakh-British Technical University
Anatoly Kornev, Kazakh-British Technical University
Ramesh Kini, Kazakh-British Technical University
Kevin Lano, Kings College London
Sofoklis Makridis, University of Western Macedonia
Denis Nicole, University of Southampton
Shekoufeh Rahimi, Kings College London
Alexander Romanovsky, Newcastle University
Asieh Salehi, University of Southampton
Vladimiro Sassone, University of Southampton
Nikolay Shilov, Nazarbayev University
Asqar Shotqara, Kazakh-British Technical University
Timur Umarov, Kazakh-British Technical University
Viktor Verbovskiy, Suleyman Demirel University
Toby Wilkinson, University of Southampton
Damir Yeliussizov, Kazakh-British Technical University

For queries contact: egc15@easychair.org