MOBICOM

Welcome to ACM MobiCom 2015, the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. MobiCom is the premier forum for publishing and presenting cutting-edge research in mobile systems and wireless networks. The technical program this year features 38 outstanding papers that cover a wide variety of topics including energy, sensing, security, wireless access, applications, localization, Internet of things, mobile cloud, measurement and analysis. We created a new Experience track this year to encourage authors to present extensive experiences with implementation, deployment, and operations of mobile ncomputing and wireless networks. One of the accepted papers is an Experience paper on cellular networks.

This year's call for papers attracted 207 qualified submissions from across the globe that were carefully reviewed by 46 Technical Program Committee (TPC) members (+2 TPC chairs) along with a selected group of external experts. The TPC was formed with the goal of covering diverse research expertise as well as diverse perspectives and approaches. The TPC included researchers from 12 countries including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and USA. 25% of the members were female, the highest ever in the history of MobiCom. We also had broad industry participation with TPC members from Alcatel-Lucent, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, and Telefonica.

The paper review process was double-blinded and carried out in three phases. In the first phase, each paper was reviewed by at least three TPC members, and the top 112 papers were selected for the second phase. In addition to reviewer scores, reviewer confidence and normalization with respect to other papers in a reviewer's pile, were also considered in selecting papers. In the second phase, each paper was reviewed by at least two more reviewers followed by an online, often intense, discussion, producing 68 papers for the final phase. The final TPC meeting was held on May 28th and 29th in Salt Lake City, Utah. These 68 papers were organized by their topic areas, and discussed at length at the meeting. Eventually, 38 papers were shortlisted for inclusion in the program and a shepherd from the TPC was assigned to each of these papers. As the last step, each of the shortlisted papers was shepherded through a "blind" process where the authors interacted with all the reviewers and the shepherd to address the review comments without knowing the reviewers' or the shepherds' identities. The end result is an exciting technical program composed of 38 very high quality papers.

During the review process, Prof. Robin Kravets, the TPC co-chair of MobiCom 2013, handled the papers that were co-authored by TPC chairs, and those that had conflict-of-interest with both TPC chairs. To ensure fairness and preserve the anonymity of all authors and reviewers, the assignment of reviewers, the reviews and discussions of these papers were done out of band without any exposure to the TPC chairs.