One of the premier European conferences on Distributed Computing technologies, called DisCoTec2020, was hosted by the Computer Science Department at the University of Malta between June 15 and June 19.
DisCoTec is a confederation of several conferences sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), that included:
- COORDINATION 2020 - 22nd International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages
- DAIS 2020 - 20th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
- FORTE 2020 - 40th International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems
For the first time, DisCoTec decided to honour a number of academic success stories by holding a series of tutorial sessions where top researchers exhibited mature tools developed by the community over last few years. The event also hosted the following satellite workshops:
- FOCODILE 2020 - 1st International Workshop on Foundations of Consensus and Distributed Ledgers
- ICE 2020 - 13th Interaction and Concurrency Experience workshop
DisCoTec2020 managed to attract an illustrious list of keynote speakers from both industry and academia:
- Nathalie Bertrand, INRIA Rennes Bretagne-Atlantique
- Cinzia Di Giusto, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS
- Holger Hermanns, Saarland University
- Peter Kriens, aQute & OSGi Alliance
- Karoliina Lehtinen, University of Liverpool
- Kenneth McMillan, Microsoft Research Lab Redmond
- Vassilis Zikas, University of Edinburgh
Due to the present situation, the entire event was held online. Nevertheless, there were around 250 participants from over 40 countries. They attended more than 70 presentations, broadcasted across various parallel webinar sessions that were spread over 5 days.
The themes covered by the accepted papers included concurrency models, cloud-based and large-scale systems, digital contracts, fault-tolerance and scalability, microservices, privacy and security, program logics, programming language implementations, types and verification. The IFIP Best Paper Award went to the paper titled "A true concurrent model of smart contracts executions" by Massimo Bartoletti, Letterio Galletta and Maurizio Murgia.
The runner-up papers were "TailX: Scheduling Heterogeneous Multiget Queries to Improve Tail Latencies in Key-Value Stores" by Vikas Jaiman, Etienne Rivière and Sonia Ben Mokhtar and "Defining and Verifying Durable Opacity: Correctness for Persistent Software Transactional Memory" by Eleni Bila, Simon Doherty, Brijesh Dongol, John Derrick, Gerhard Schellhorn, and Heike Wehrheim. All the presentations and publications of the event have been made public on the conference page.
Prof. Adrian Francalanza the General Chair of DisCoTec2020, would like to thank all the members of the local organisation that made the event possible. These include, in alphabetical order, Duncan Paul Attard, Veronica Barbara, Christian Bartolo Burlo, Andrew Bezzina, Kurt Borg, Lucienne Bugeja, Caroline Caruana, Patrick Catania, Sarah Sammut and Jasmine Xuereb.
