Welcome to DCCS 2013 — this is a fantastic time to work on dependability. Everyday life has become inherently dependent on computerized networked systems whose complexity is rapidly growing. Providing resilience to malicious attacks, accidental faults, design errors, and unexpected operating conditions is therefore becoming simultaneously more important and more challenging. If these systems are unreliable, insecure or untrustworthy, significant harm can result, and users will abandon them, thus squandering opportunities for progress.

The Dependable Computing and Communications Symposium (DCCS) brings together academic and industrial researchers in all aspects of dependability and security.  We present the very best work on all aspects of the research and practice of creating, validating, deploying, and maintaining systems to achieve dependability and security.  All aspects of dependable systems are covered, ranging from VLSI and CPU architecture, at the bottom of the stack, all the way up through operating systems, networks, application software, and human factors.  With this comprehensive coverage of dependability and security as the core theme of DCCS, the technical program of DCCS ’13 provides a cutting edge view of the state of the art and practice in this key and ever expanding area of computing.

I would like to thank all the researchers and practitioners who submitted papers -– those whose papers were accepted and also those whose weren’t –- for making DCCS ’13 a great conference.  We have a program comprised of 21 papers, reflecting a highly selective acceptance rate of 19.6%.  The program was selected by an outstanding program committee that worked extremely hard: 469 reviews, several days of online deliberations, and in full-day PC meeting, with members flying in from around the world to attend. This level of dedication to providing service deserves the community’s sincere thanks and gratitude.

The review process was very rigorous. Paper reviewing was double-blind, with none of the PC members knowing author names or affiliations.  Each paper submitted received at least three PC member reviews.  Papers selected for a second review round received multiple additional reviews. All authors had the opportunity to submit author comments, and the comments were reviewed by PC members for every paper (including those which did not progress to the second round).  During the PC meeting, every paper with at least one PC member supporting acceptance was discussed in depth.  Whenever papers with potential conflicts of interest came up, all the potentially conflicted PC members were excluded from the discussion.  I would like to personally thank Prof. Saurabh Bagchi for coordinating the review process of papers for which I had a potential conflict of interest, thus allowing even the PC chair to not be excepted from the double-blind process.

I deeply appreciate the efforts of the General Chair (András Pataricza) and his team, the support from the steering committee led by Neeraj Suri and Rick Schlichting, as well as the new steering committee leaders Roberto Baldoni and Paulo Veríssimo, and the tremendous help I received from DCCS’s most recent PC chairs, Saurabh Bagchi and Philip Koopman. Finally, I want to thank my graduate students for their logistical support (including developing new software for runing the PC meeting) that made the paper selection so much more efficient and smooth.

I hope you enjoy the program !

George Candea,
EPFL
DCCS ’12 Program Chair