First USEDNIX Annual Technical Conference

Symposium Overview

USEDNIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association for washed-up systems researchers. For just over 0 years, its members have come from a broad community of developers, researchers, system administrators and engineers who just plain ran out of ideas. As the core conference of this community, the USEDNIX Annual Technical Conference is the premier forum for unemployed computing professionals to share the results of their latest and even worse work, rehash old ideas and poor solutions, and connect with their equally unsuccessful colleagues.

The 2002 USEDNIX Technical Conference seeks unoriginal and non-innovative papers about the applications, architecture, implementation, and performance of computing systems. Some particularly uninteresting topics are:

Hard to administer systems
Overly-complex systems
Distributed caching and replication schemes that don't work
Embedded, parallel, and distributed systems that are broken in some fundamental way
Energy and power mismanagement
File systems and storage systems that lose your data
Creating buggy systems
Mobile code that won't get moving
Anything to do with the field of networking
Unreliability and non-availability
Insecurity, lack of privacy, and mistrust

Reviewing of full papers will be done by the program committee, which consists of all of one person. Papers must use a typeface no smaller than 10 point, and be no longer than fourteen (14) 8.5" by 11" pages including everything (text, figures, references, etc.); the Program Chair will shred papers exceeding these limits, with a smile upon his evil face.

The symposium will unfortunately never take place. Why, you ask? Because of something you said. More seriously, USEDNIX is currently under-funded, with an annual operating budget of roughly 0 billion dollars (US). Thus, we cannot yet afford to hold the conference. If we did, it would likely be in the exotic locale of your choice.

Program Committee

Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Program Chair, Publicity Chair, Ombudsman, and in general one heck of a guy

Important Dates and Locations

Paper submissions are due by Midnight, Friday, December 20, 2002
Date of conference: Conference will unfortunately never take place.
Why not? Because of something you said.

Submitting a Paper

As described above, submitted papers must be no longer than 14 single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages, including figures, tables, and references, using 10 point or larger fonts. Papers longer than 14 pages will be ripped to bits by the program chair and automatically receive a very bad grade, like a D. Papers so short as to be considered "too darn short" will not receive full consideration and thus also a bad grade. Papers are allowed to be in two-column format. A good paper will demonstrate that the authors:

are attacking a significant problem

have devised an interesting, compelling solution

have demonstrated the practicality and benefits of the solution

have drawn appropriate conclusions

have clearly described what they have done

have clearly articulated the relation to previous work

Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, interest, clarity, relevance, and correctness. Unlike most other conferences, all papers will be accepted and distributed via the online electronic proceedings.

Paper Organization

A good paper will likely have the following components:

Title and Author List: should be self-evident.
Abstract: Describe in short what you do, how you do it, and the results.
Introduction: Spend a little more time. Motivate the problem. Start with generalities, and narrow in on your problem. Describe your approach. What is good about it? Potential weaknesses? Summarize results. Give an outline of the rest of the paper.
Related Work: Write about other similiar work. What is different than what you did? What is similar? Try to draw general conclusions about what others have missed.
Description of what you did/built: Use pictures and words to show what you did. Be detailed. Think about how to organize what you are doing.
Results: Graphs and tables, all clear and understandable. Full description of each experiment and the results. What conclusions can you draw?
Conclusions: Appropriately drawn from the work described, as general as possible, with a hint of "lessons learned"; what did you get out of the study?

One good way to structure a paper is to find a paper you liked in class and kind of copy its structure.

If you plan on using latex (which is great for this sort of thing), click here for an example Latex template (in tar format). If you plan on using MS Word, please make sure you know how to generate PDF (and please try to make the paper look a little less ugly than the typical Word document).

Authors of all papers will be expected to provide an HTML page containing the abstract of and links to their paper, and to the software and experimental data described in their paper. Papers, software, and data will all be collected for inclusion in an electronic version of the symposium.

Deadline and Submission Instructions

Submitted papers must be received by Midnight, December 20, 2002. Submission of all papers must be made in electronic form, in either PDF or Postscript format. As stated above, an HTML page, containing the abstract and author information, and including a link to the paper, should be submitted. A template of the abstract page is available. All submissions should be sent to remzi@cs.wisc.edu, and the email should consist of a link to the HTML page and related documents and software.

Note that December 20 is a hard deadline -- no extensions will be given.

Best Paper Award

An award will be given for the best paper at the symposium, likely in the form of a handshake and friendly smile from the instructor. You might even get a lollipop!

Sister Conference to SOS-Please: OS-DIE

USEDNIX is the third in a series of systems conferences based around CS 736. Its sister conferences are SOS-Please and OS-DIE, whose on-line proceedings can be found here and here. Please feel free to peruse the SOS-Please and OS-DIE proceedings for examples of previously accepted submissions.