Report on the Asia-Pacific Systems Workshop 2015 (APSys'15)

Building on the success of its 2010–2014 predecessors in New Delhi, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore, and Beijing, APSys 2015 was held July 27th and 28th in Tokyo. The mission of APSys is to be a forum for systems researchers and practitioners across the world to meet, interact, and collaborate with their peers from the Asia/Pacific region. The workshop had 112 registered attendees, the second largest attendance thus far. Approximately 61% of attendees were from Japan, 12% from Korea, 12% from the U.S., 9% from China, and 3% from Europe as shown in Figure 1. We received 68 submissions, almost double that of last year and only exceeded by the 73 submissions of 2013. Each paper got at least 3 reviews by a program committee of 24. Upon receiving all reviews, each paper was discussed online. We accepted 20 papers, a 29.4% acceptance rate that is lower than the 33% average for APSys. APSys continued to attract submissions from many countries. Approximately 1/3rd of the accepted papers are from the U.S. and Canada, 1/6th each from China, Korea, and Europe, and the remaining papers from Australia, India, Japan, and Singapore. Table 1 shows the paper submission statistics by country for all APSys workshops so far. Each paper was shepherded by a program committee member, a first for APSys. Among the rejected papers, the program committee pre-accepted eight papers for poster presentation. Out of 21 submissions, we accepted 19 posters for presentation. We received 24 applications for SIGOPSsponsored student travel grants and awarded 14. Besides the paper and poster presentations, the 2-day workshop program contained a talk by Gernot Heiser on “How To Write A Systems Paper” and a lively panel on “Teaching Systems” with Gernot Heiser, KyoungSoo Park, and Robbert van Renesse, led by Haibo Chen. Finally, we had a “Systems Research in Asia-Pacific Industry” session with the following talks: