6th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems

January 29 - February 2, 2001
Plaza San Antonio Hotel
San Antonio, Texas, USA

Conference Organizers
Program Chairs
Rajendra Raj, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
Yi-Min Wang, Microsoft Research

Program Committee
Mustaque Ahamed, Georgia Tech.
Ken Arnold, Sun Microsystems
Don Box, DevelopMentor
Murthy Devarakonda, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Rachid Guerraoui, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland
Jennifer Hamilton, Microsoft Corporation
Eric Jul, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Doug Lea, State University of New York at Oswego
Keith Marzullo, University of California, San Diego
Ira Pohl, University of California, Santa Cruz
Douglas C. Schmidt, University of California, Irvine
Christopher Small, Osprey Partners LLC
Robert Stroud, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Bjarne Stroustrup, AT&T Labs
Joe Sventek, Agilent Laboratories, Scotland
Steve Vinoski, IONA Technologies, Inc.
Werner Vogels, Cornell University
Shalini Yajnik, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
Deborra Zukowski, Zedak Corp.

Tutorial Program Chair
Douglas C. Schmidt, University of California, Irvine

Advanced Workshops Chair
Murthy Devarakonda, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Overview
As the first COOTS of the twenty-first century, COOTS '01 invites quality papers describing research or experience with object technology. Research papers should describe original work that offers significant contributions to the state of object technology. Experience papers should describe general insights gained from object technology practice. Submitted papers should make substantial contributions to the field and should be useful to researchers and practitioners alike.

This conference will last 5 days. Two days of tutorials will be followed by two days of technical sessions including refereed papers, guest lecturers, and a Work-in-Progress session(s). The last day of the conference will feature two Advanced Topics Workshops.

Topics
Relevant topics for COOTS '01 include, but are not limited to, the following:

• distributed systems and applications
• objects on the web
• component technologies
• middleware
• frameworks
• object databases and persistence
• systems testing, measurement and performance
• reliability
• security
• analysis and design methods
• design patterns
• language design and implementation
• programming techniques and application experiences
• development platforms, environments and tools

Questions about the relevance of a topic may be addressed to the Program Chairs at coots01chairs@usenix.org

Keynote Speaker and Guest Lecturers
In the tradition of USENIX conferences, COOTS '01 will feature prominent speakers who use their extraordinary insights, original thinking, creativity, and years of experience to help make a difference in the way we think about, design, develop, and deploy large software systems. The first day of the technical sessions will feature a Keynote Address on pervasive computing by Michael Karasick of the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, and the second day of the technical sessions will feature an invited talk on the infrastructure of the Web by Bjorn Freeman-Benson of Amazon.com.

Tutorials
On January 29 and 30, the COOTS conference will begin with tutorials. Tutorial topics may include distributed object systems (CORBA, COM+/Windows DNA, Java RMI/Jini, etc.); component technologies; web technologies (XML, web servers, etc.); framework design; and object-oriented languages.

If you are interested in proposing a tutorial, contact the USENIX tutorial coordinator: Dan Klein, Email: dvk@usenix.org, Phone: +1.412.422.0285.

Technical Sessions
On January 31 and February 1, the technical sessions will follow the tutorials. COOTS emphasizes research and advanced engineering aspects of object technology, focusing on experimental systems research. Conference Proceedings containing all refereed papers will be distributed to attendees and, following the conference, will be available online to USENIX members and for purchase. An award will be given for the best student paper at the conference.

Work-In-Progress Abstracts
This year, COOTS will include new session(s) on "work in progress" (WIP) to introduce new ideas to the community and solicit early feedback. We are particularly interested in the presentation of student work and bleeding edge usage of objects in industry. WIP abstracts will be lightly screened to facilitate focused discussions during these sessions. The submission process for WIP abstracts will begin in Sept. 2000. Full submission information will be available at the conference Web site.

Advanced Topics Workshops
The conference will conclude with two Advanced Topics Workshops, where smaller audiences can exchange in-depth technical information on a few position papers. The topics will be finalized and made available on the conference web site.

Attendance at the workshop is limited to the attendees of the main technical program and is based on acceptance of a position paper. As in past years, tutorial presenters, invited speakers, and authors of accepted papers in the technical program will also be invited to attend the workshop of their choice.

Potential workshop attendees are invited to submit a position paper in ASCII text of at most three (3) pages via electronic mail to the Workshops Chair no later than Dec 1, 2000. Acceptance notices to the authors will be issued by Dec 20, 2000. Position papers should briefly describe experiences, work in progress, and/or ongoing research and development in the topic area. A representative subset of authors of position papers may be invited to make informal presentations at the workshops.

If you have any questions regarding the topics, especially if you are concerned whether your focus is relevant to the chosen topics, do not hesitate to send electronic mail to the Workshops Chair at coots01ATWchair@usenix.org.

What to Submit
Full papers should be 10 to 15 pages (around 5,000-6,000 words). Papers that are too long or are late will be rejected. All submissions will be judged on originality, significance, relevance, correctness, and clarity. Each submission must include the paper title, the contact author, email and regular addresses, and a phone number. For more information, please read the detailed author guidelines.

The COOTS conference, like most conferences and journals, requires that papers not be submitted simultaneously to any other conference or publication, that submissions not be previously published, and that accepted papers not be subsequently published elsewhere. Papers accompanied by non-disclosure agreement forms are not acceptable and will be returned to the author(s) unread. All submissions are held in the highest confidentiality prior to publication in the Proceedings, both as a matter of policy and in accord with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.

How to Submit
Web-based electronic submission will be expected. Submissions should be in Postscript that is interpretable by Ghostscript or in PDF that is interpretable by Acroread, and should be printable on US Letter sized paper. Please use this Web form for submissions. All submissions will be acknowledged.

Submitters for whom web submission is a hardship should contact the Program Chairs for alternative means of submission at coots01chairs@usenix.org.

Registration Materials
Complete program and registration information will be available in October 2000 here at the conference Web site. The information will be in both html and a printable PDF file. If you would like to receive the program booklet in print, please email your request, including your postal address, to: conference@usenix.org.