Proceedings of the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference -- IMC 2012. Even though the roots of IMC are in Internet measurements, it has now become the premier venue for measurement-based research into all kinds of networks that comprise the Internet ecosystem at large, including data centers, social networks, cellular networks, and the applications that run on these networks. This year's program reflects that diversity of the IMC community. IMC 2012 received 183 papers that complied with the submission guidelines, of which 45 were accepted for publication. As usual, we solicited both long papers with deep treatment of topics and short papers that convey exciting work in progress, offer high-level visions, or present more succinct viewpoints. We received 101 long papers and 82 short papers, and we accepted 35 long papers and 10 short papers (which implies that short papers experienced a lower acceptance rate). All submitted papers underwent a rigorous review process by a highly skilled and diverse program committee (PC) of 32 members (including us). Reviewing was done over two rounds. In the first round, each paper was reviewed by three PC members. 119 papers were picked for the second round, and each paper was reviewed by at least two more PC members. The final decisions were based on all the reviews, extensive online discussions, and a day-long meeting which was attended in-person by all but four PC members. Along with the papers, we are publishing a review summary document for each accepted paper. The document contains almost-verbatim reviews, without the numerical scores, and a response by authors as to how they considered review feedback in preparing the final versions of the paper. This "experiment" was started in IMC 2011 to provide transparency into the review process, and we decided to continue it based on feedback from conference attendees. We made two small changes to it: participation was mandatory for the authors, and the document is being published separately to enable tracking of how frequently it was downloaded and viewed by the community. We made a major change to IMC paper awards this year. In previous years, IMC has offered one best paper award, but only papers that made their data publicly available were eligible. While this encouraged data sharing, great work by authors who had legitimate reasons for not being able to share their data was left unrecognized. We decided to decouple the concerns by offering two awards: one best paper award for which all accepted papers are eligible, and one community award for which only papers that share their data with the community are eligible. In addition to technical presentations, this year's program contains a panel and a community feedback session. The motivation for the panel is summed up well by its title: "Facilitating rigorous interdisciplinary research using network measurement data." Composed of panelists from both inside and outside of the network measurement community, we hope it will promote a timely conversation because the datasets produced by our community are being increasingly used by other communities (e.g., economics and public policy). The community feedback session, a continuation from last year, provides a forum for short talks on topics that are relevant to the IMC audience such as announcing a new tool or dataset and sharing experience with collecting or analyzing data.