PAM 2024 : Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2024

The Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) conference brings together researchers and operators to discuss novel and emerging work in the area of network measurement and analysis. PAM is inclusive of all areas of network measurement, but focuses on systems-based research and real-world data. Indeed, measurement technology is needed at all layers of the network stack, ranging from power profiling of hardware components to virtualization in data centers to application profiling and even user experience. Work with operational impact or relevance to the broader network research community is especially welcome, as are early and promising measurement techniques and replications of existing studies. Original contributions that advance the state-of-the-art in the following areas are invited:

Applications (e.g., web, streaming, games)
Data centers and cloud computing
Energy
IoT (e.g., smart home, SCADA, ICS, embedded systems)
Measurement tools and software
Network security
User privacy
Overlays (e.g., P2P, CDNs)
Physical Layer
Routing
Social networks
Topology
Transport/congestion control
User behavior and experience, QoE
Virtualization (e.g., SDN, NFV)
Visualization
Wireless, cellular, and mobile
Replication and reproducibility
Although PAM traditionally attracts early stage contributions, works that are a reappraisal or independent validation of previous results, or which enhance the reproducibility of network measurement research, for instance by publishing new datasets on an existing topic, are explicitly included in PAM’s scope. PAM 2024 will be held virtually.

Important Dates
Paper registration October 28th 2023 AoE (October 29th 11:59:59AM UTC)
Paper submission November 2nd 2023 AoE (November 3rd 11:59:59AM UTC)
Notification December 13th, 2023
Camera-ready due February 1st, 2024
Conference March 11-13, 2024
Submission Guidelines
Authors should only submit original work that has not been published before and is not under submission to any other venue.

PAM welcomes both short and long submissions. This includes early-stage contributions of work that is less mature but shows exciting promise, articulates a high-level vision, and describes challenging future directions for the community or validates, verifies important results, or presents new ideas that challenge existing assumptions. Submissions should describe original research, with succinctness appropriate to the topics and themes they discuss.

We will consider paper submissions that extend previously published short, or preliminary papers (including PAM short papers), following the model of the ACM SIGCOMM policy.

Submission Requirements
All submissions must satisfy the following requirements:

Follow Springer LNCS format (see https://www.springer.com/us/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines)

Short papers: Up to 12 pages for technical content (up to 5 pages for appendices and references)

Long papers: Up to 24 pages for technical content (up to 5 pages for appendices and references)

Note that reviewers are not required to read appendices. Everything needed to evaluate the paper should appear in the first 12 pages for short and 24 pages for long papers.

Anonymization: Reviewing will be double-blind

Do not include names or affiliations of authors in the submission.
Refer to your prior work in the third person.
Make a best effort to anonymize system names that would give you away.
If you have any concerns about how to anonymize your paper while maintaining its integrity, contact the PC chairs.

Submit via HotCRP: TBA.

Ethical Considerations
Ethics will be considered during the review process. Submissions that raise ethical concerns are required to include a statement (in the main paper, not in the Appendix) detailing the ethical concerns. If the submission does not raise ethical concerns, no statement is required. PAM follows the standard set by the Internet Measurement Conference (from which we base this section). Papers describing experiments with users or sensitive user data (e.g., network traffic, passwords, social network information) must follow basic precepts of ethical research and subscribe to community norms. These include: respect for privacy, secure storage of sensitive data, voluntary and informed consent if users are placed at risk, avoiding deceptive practices when not essential, beneficence (maximizing the benefits to an individual or to society while minimizing harm to the individual), and risk mitigation. Authors may want to consult the Menlo Report (https://catalog.caida.org/paper/2012_menlo_report_actual_formatted) for further information on ethical principles and the Allman/Paxson IMC 2007 paper (https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2007/papers/imc80.pdf) for guidance on ethical data sharing. Note that submitting research for approval by each author’s institutional ethics review body is necessary, but not sufficient – in cases where the PC has concerns about the ethics of the work in a submission, the PC will consider the ethical soundness and justification of any paper, just as it does its technical soundness. Authors unsure about ethical issues are welcome to contact the program committee co-chairs.

Awards
There will be two awards for papers of exceptional merit. The Best Paper Award will recognize the paper that is deemed by the committee to have the highest merit of all the submissions. The Community Contribution Award will be given to the best paper that makes relevant datasets, source code, or platforms available to the public by the time the camera-ready is submitted. These artifacts must be sufficiently documented such that any researcher can use them to repeat the results or procedures described in the paper, and they must be placed in a sufficiently long-lived archival repository (e.g.,Github, Bitbucket, or CRAWDAD).

Replication Papers are welcome!
Works that are a reappraisal or independent validation of previous results, or which enhance the reproducibility of network measurement research, for instance by publishing new datasets on an existing topic, are explicitly included in PAM’s scope. Submissions that replicate papers should offer comparisons and analysis to the systems, settings, and data used in the work they replicate.

As described in similar replication tracks (e.g. USENIX SOUPS), replication papers:

Will be held to the same technical standards as other submissions,
Should use up to date methodologies and avoid using outdated techniques only because they appeared in previous studies,
May repeat procedures of existing studies, or explore their extensibility,
And should provide an explanation of the value of performing a replication study.
Organizers
General Chair: Esteban Carisimo (Northwestern University)
PC Chairs: Philipp Richter (Akamai), Vaibhav Bajpai (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)