Conference Aim and Scope

Notice

  • The organizing committee of GECON 2020 has decided all sessions will be held exclusively online!
  • We consider the new online format to offer opportunities for exploring new ways of improving the interaction and feedback of the audience with speakers and promoting networking among the conference participants.
  • The registration fee of the online conference has been reduced to 250€ for one author of each publication, 100€ for participants, and 10€ for students.
  • The selection process will run as planned. The timely publication of accepted papers in the proceedings of GECON 2020 will be published in the LNCS series of Springer as announced.
  • Due to the new online format, GECON maintains open the proposal for special sessions. With the objective of encouraging alternative forms of participation that can increase discussions of technical topics and new ideas, we solicit special topic and Birds of a Feather session proposals. Deadline for special session proposals is August 15th, 2020.

Scope

GECON 2020 builds upon the very successful tradition of the conference previous editions since 2003 (http://www.gecon-conference.org). GECON solicits contributions that are interdisciplinary, combining business and economic aspects with engineering and computer science related themes. Contributions to this conference can include extensions to existing technologies, successful deployments of technologies, economic analyses, analyses of technology adoptions, and theoretical models. We welcome papers that combine micro- and macro-economic principles with resource management strategies in computer science and engineering. Case studies, which demonstrate practical use of economic strategies, benefits and limitations, are particularly encouraged. The purpose of this event is to gather original work and build a strong multidisciplinary community in this increasingly important area of a future information and knowledge economy.

Important Dates

Deadlines for full papers, work-in-progress (WIP) papers, posters, and wild-and-crazy-idea (WACI) papers are:

  • Abstract submission of full paper, work-in-progress paper, wild-and-crazy-idea paper by: May 18th, 2020 May 31st, 2020
  • Full papers, work-in-progress papers, and wild-and-crazy-idea paper submission deadline: May 25th, 2020 June 7th, 2020
  • Notification of acceptance: June 29th, 2020 July 6th, 2020
  • Camera-ready paper deadline: July 6th, 2020 July 13th, 2020
  • Poster Submission Deadline for Accepted Papers: July 20th, 2020
  • Birds of a Feather Session Proposals: August 15th, 2020

Please visit the submission page for more information on the publication and reviewing process. 

Topics of Interest

Advances in distributed systems technology have allowed for the provisioning of IT services on an unprecedented scale and with increasing flexibility. As a global market for infrastructures, platforms and software services emerge the need to understand and deal with these implications, and a multitude of new interdisciplinary challenges is quickly growing. Therefore, GECON encourages the submission of papers which combine at least one economic/legal area and one technology area.

GECON’s list of areas includes, but is not limited to:

Economics

  • Incentive design, strategic behavior & game theory
  • Market mechanisms, auctions models, and bidding languages
  • Economic efficiency
  • (Techno) Economic analysis and modelling
  • Pricing schemes and revenue models
  • Metering, accounting, and billing
  • Cost‐benefit analysis
  • Automated trading and bidding support tools
  • Trust, reputation, security, and risk management
  • Performance monitoring, optimization, and prediction
  • Analysis and reports on industry, test-beds and operational markets
  • Energy efficiency, sustainability
  • Business models and strategies, decision support

Law and Legal aspects

  • Standardization, interoperability, and legal aspects
  • Service level agreements (SLAs), negotiation, enforcement and monitoring
  • Open source ecosystems
  • Privacy

Clouds, Grids, Systems and Services

  • IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and Federation of resources
  • Vertical scaling, burstable computing, vertical elasticity
  • Resource management: allocation, sharing, scheduling, and capacity planning
  • Virtualization and Containers
  • Service Science, Management and engineering (SSME)
  • Software engineering
  • Security

Technologies Transforming the Economy

  • Smart grids, cities or  buildings
  • Energy-aware infrastructures and services
  • Fog and edge computing
  • Micro‐services, Serverless computing
  • Internet‐of‐Things
  • Blockchains
  • Community networks
  • Social networks
  • Big data
  • Data stream ingestion and complex event processing

 

Special Sessions

Special Topic Session: Digital Infrastructures to Support Decision Making for Pandemic Response and Countermeasures

With the COVID-19 outbreak having officially become a pandemic, authorities have claim the use of digital tools to support decision making. Public health systems are one of the more complex services in each country. Guaranteeing the provision and the quality of service in a pandemic situation, like the one we are experiencing, requires an holistic approach that involves different aspects such as economics, mobility, logistic, policy, and technology. Time is crucial for governments to ensure social distancing, and the utilization of digital technologies. Big data and cloud computing technologies could be very helpful in providing real-time and precise information for making decisions. Moreover, the post-outbreak period will also require an intensive use of digital resources for booting the economy very quickly.

The purpose of this special session is to promote the focus of research on these challenges. As the GECON community comprises multi-disciplinary skills for addressing these challenges, we are optimistic that this special session will bring provide highly useful ideas and results. Special session topics include but are not limited to the cost, benefit, and social aspects of:

  • Digital support to pandemic control policies
  • Fintech platforms to facilitate SME credit and supporting small businesses: big data, blockchain finance, supply chain finance
  • Analytical and simulation scalable capabilities of models and data involved in pandemic: resource allocation systems, health diffusion, population dynamics, individual behavior.
  • Active and reactive involvement of the citizens, patients and other actors in a pandemic.
  • Collaborative tools for data, models, methods, and resources sharing to support decision making.
  • Recommender systems based on semantic location-based and mobility services

Contact: The GECON 2020 Chair and Vice-Chairs, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Special Topic Session: Decentralising Clouds to Deliver Intelligence at the Edge

An increasing fraction of Internet traffic is being generated by massive numbers of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices being deployed at the borders of our greatest communication infrastructure. Under such circumstances, the obvious benefits of processing this data close to its sources are pushing operators to deploy what is becoming known as Fog Computing resources close to the edge of networks, which decreases load while also enabling to better cater for latency-sensitive services. Such paradigm refers to a decentralised computing infrastructure capable of running applications and process data in heterogenous compute regions deployed throughout the space between traditional cloud data centers and the network’s edge, creating a sort of computing continuum. This special session aims at bringing together experts and involved stakeholders participating to the design, implementation and utilisation of fog computing environments in different vertical scenarios, such as (but not limited to) smart cities, logistics, constructions, robotics, energy, industry, automotive, water supply, and much more. 

The challenges of managing a highly decentralised and heterogeneous fog infrastructure, where resources can range from high-performance servers in data centers to very resource-constrained nodes deployed near the edge, require the academic and industrial communities to extend existing cloud technologies or even create novel solutions to deliver features such as automated service and data management, virtualisation, resiliency, security and privacy in the fog domain. In turn, this technological push is creating novel business opportunities for service providers and applications developers, which will be able to offer added-value services at the edge, based on advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, low-latency response and actuation, etc. Benefits for the involved stakeholders shall be evaluated by means of techno-economic analysis, study of business cases, characterisation of use-case scenarios, presentation of small- and large-scale pilots and evaluation of policy issues.

Contact: Seugwoo Kum (Korean Electronics Technology Institute, Korea) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  and Domenico Siracusa  (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Special Topic Session: Sustainability of Digital Infrastructures: Social, Economic, and Policy Aspects for Material Resources Supporting the Digital World

The objective of the session will be around the feasibility and sustainability of digital infrastructures, critical for participation in modern society, in a diverse and unequal world. General aspects may relate to basic human rights, social, economic, cultural rights, intersecting with business and commerce, and the policy and economics of expanding coverage, capacity and operation of material infrastructures for our digital world. Specific aspects may relate to the
  • Economic sustainability of technological infrastructures (e.g. networks, clouds, sensors/IoT),
  • Centralisation, diversity, competition, cooperation and decentralisation of technological infrastructures,
  • Governance models such as private, public, competitive, cooperative, commons
  • Business/sustainability models such as pay-per-service, freemium, indirect or ad-based, and
  • Investments through crowdfunding, crowdlending, shares, tokens, and ICO.

Contact: Leandro Navarro (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain),  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; Felix Freitag (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Special Topic Session: Business and Economic Aspects of Machine Learning, Cognitive Systems and Data Science

With the growing trend for the Internet of things, demand for safe infrastructures has tremendously increased. Infrastructure failures (e.g., network downtime or outages) are expensive and should be avoided by all means, as they impact business operations and might, also, generate tremendous costs. There are many reasons why infrastructures built of computers, devices, network, information systems fail. Several studies address these failures by focusing on defining new approaches that could help automating some of the operation functions of the systems management. Today, the emerging trend is to use techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine leaning and data science. In this special topic session, we are going a step further by inviting submissions of papers that address this topic with a special focus on cost aspects, business models, and economics behind artificial intelligence:

  • Impact analysis of machine learning and their potential applications in systems management
  • Economic models of autonomous system management
  • Network, Devices and Computers Management
  • Business models for IT and IoT Infrastructure
  • AI-Software as a Service
  • Cloud platforms for AI-methods
  • Social organization of robots and drones

Contact: Aurilla Aurelie Arntzen (University of South-Eastern, Norway), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Contact information

All questions about the venue should be emailed to Vlado Stankovski  <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>  

All questions about paper submissions should be emailed to José Ángel Bañares <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

All questions about WACI paper and poster submissions should be emailed to Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>