| Abstract | Welcome to ACM MobiCom 2013, the 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. Over the years, MobiCom has established itself as a premier forum for publishing and presenting cutting-edge research in mobile systems and wireless networks, and this year's final program continues this wonderful tradition.
The high quality and success of MobiCom can be credited to two groups. First and foremost is the authors of all of the submitted papers who submitted their very best research ideas and results. The 28 accepted papers represent leading-edge, and sometimes bleeding-edge, advances in a large variety of important mobile computing topics -- from traditional yet still very important topics, such as improving the efficiency of cellular and Wi-Fi networks, to topics focusing on the use of new wireless technologies in new mobile environments, such as enabling gesture recognition, managing indoor white space networks, and deploying performance improving femto cells. However, the hidden strength of MobiCom comes from the hard work of a very dedicated program committee, which consisted of 41 members from academia, government and industry spread across 7 different countries with expertise in many areas relevant to wireless networking and mobile computing.
As Program Committee (PC) chairs, it was our task to keep MobiCom fresh and grow it to keep up with all the new challenges of the wireless and mobile community. This year, we introduced several new initiatives to further enhance the reach and quality of the conference. To increase MobiCom's visibility in industry, we included five PC members from product teams of Cisco, Google, Qualcomm and Broadcom. To ensure the strength and breadth, but most importantly the vision, of the PC, one-sixth of the PC were new members who had previously not served on the MobiCom PC. This year's MobiCom also has an invited industry session, in which speakers from Broadcom, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, and Microsoft will present the latest results and research challenges from industry in an effort to bridge the gap between academic research and how it is, or maybe isn't, relevant to industry.
This year's call for papers attracted 207 submissions from five continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, North America and South America. We used HotCRP for handling the paper submission and reviewing, which was done in three phases. In the first phase, each paper was reviewed by at least three PC members, and the top 98 papers were selected for the next round. In the second phase, each paper was reviewed by at least two more PC members. In some cases when the paper was at the intersection of new topics, such as RADAR or robotics, additional expert opinions were solicited. The final phase was the PC meeting held on May 30th and 31st in Redmond, WA. A total of 34 members attended the PC meeting in-person, while 5 members attended the meeting on Skype. Over one and a half days, the PC extensively discussed the merits and flaws of the 60 toprated papers and ultimately accepted 28 papers for final publication in the conferences' proceedings. Across the three phases, each PC member reviewed about 25 papers, such that most round two papers had an average of 6 reviews (a high number for any top-tier conference). To ensure fairness and preserve the anonymity of all authors and reviewers, papers authored by PC chairs were mixed with a random selection of other papers and handled out-of-band by Alex Snoeren, who was the PC co-chair for MobiCom 2012. |
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