SAC 2026 - Track on Dependable, Adaptive, and Trustworthy Distributed Systems

Dependable, Adaptive, and Secure Distributed Systems 21st DADS Track of the 41st ACM Symposium on Applied Computing	Previous years: 20^th DADS 2025 19^th DADS 2024 18^th DADS 2023 17^th DADS 2022 16^th DADS 2021 15^th DADS 2020 14^th DADS 2019 13^th DADS 2018 12^th DADS 2017 11^th DADS 2016 10^th DADS 2015 9^th DADS 2014 8^th DADS 2013 7^th DADS 2012 6^th DADS 2011 5^th DADS 2010 4^th DADS 2009 3^rd DADS 2008 2^nd DADS 2007 1^st DADS 2006
http://www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2026/ March 23-27, 2026 Thessaloniki, Greece

The Symposium on Applied Computing has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2026 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing and the SRC Program is sponsored by Microsoft Research.

Topics of Interest - Track Committee - Important Dates - Submission Guidelines

Call for Papers

While computing is provided by the cloud and services increasingly pervade our daily lives, dependability, adaptiveness and security become a cornerstone of the information society. Unfortunately, most innovative systems and applications (Internet of Things, Industrial IoT, smart environments, microservices, NewSQL, blockchains) suffer from a lack of dependability and security, which is fueled by global scale and AI usage.

Among technical factors, software development methods, tools, and techniques contribute to dependability and security, as defects in software products and services may lead to failure and also provide typical access for malicious attacks. In addition, there is a wide variety of fault and intrusion tolerance techniques available, including data stores, redundancy and replication, group communication, transactions, reliable middleware, cloud infrastructures, microservice mashups, light-weight virtualization (docker), and trustworthy service-oriented and microservice architectures with explicit control of quality of service and monitoring of service level agreements.

Furthermore, adaptiveness is envisaged in order to react to observed, or act upon expected changes of the system itself, the context/environment (e.g., resource variability or failure/threat scenarios) or users' needs and expectations. Provided without explicit user intervention, this is also termed autonomous behavior or self-properties, and often involves monitoring, diagnosis (analysis, interpretation), and reconfiguration (repair). Finally large language models are increasingly used in engineering but pose their own unique challenges for dependability and security, e.g., hallucination, bias, accuracy, privacy, scalability, cost-efficiency.

Topics of Interest

The track provides a forum for scientists and engineers in academia and industry to present and discuss their latest research findings on selected topics in dependable, adaptive and trustworthy distributed systems and services. The topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

Dependable, Adaptive, and secure Distributed Systems (DADS): E.g., Distributed ledger technologies: Blockchain and Smart Contracts Massive scale, scalable applications, performance-aware dependability Big data Self-* properties and autonomous behaviour Adaptable and adaptive security Fault and intrusion tolerance Power-awareness, adaptive energy management, green computing, energy harvesting Integration and balancing of competing attributes, CAP, continuos inconsistency
Large Language Models (LLM) and AI for DADS: E.g., LLM appliances to improve dependability and security LLM appliances to support the engineering of DADS LLM challenges for dependability like hallucination, bias, accuracy, privacy, scalability, cost-efficiency.
Architectures, architectural styles, and middleware for DADS: E.g., Dezentralized Applications (D’Apps) and Blockchain-as-a-Service Cloud systems and cloud-deployed applications Microservices and Service Mashups Light-weight virtualization, Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm Event-based systems, Publish-subscribe systems Ransomware-as-a-Service: Threat diversification and measurements In-memory computing Safety vs Security
Protocols for DADS: E.g., Consensus protocols (PBFT, Proof-of-work, Proof-of-stake, Proof-of-*) Group communication, replication, transaction, coordination, orchestration Failure detection, containment, and recovery Dynamic (re-)configuration
Modeling, design, and engineering of DADS: E.g., DevOps and SecDevOps support for dependability and security Design patterns for DADS SAST and DAST tools Quantitative approaches
Foundations and formal methods for DADS: E.g., Rigorous approaches, verification, assurance cases.
Applications of DADS: E.g., IoT-Internet of Things, Smart Environments, and Assistive Technologies NewSQL and big data Industrial IoT, Industry 4.0, Digital Twin Safety critical systems Avionics and CNS (Communication, Navigation, Surveillance) Automotive systems Power utility automation networks, SCADA systems Critical infrastructure protection and Disaster scenarios Global sensor networks
Evaluations, testing, benchmarking, and case studies of DADS
Holistic aspects of DADS: E.g., Social, cultural, psychological, economical, managerial, and educational aspects.

Track Program Co-Chairs

Karl M. Göschka (Main contact chair)
University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien
Embedded Systems Institute
Hoechstaedtplatz 6
A-1200 Vienna, Austria
phone: +43 664 180 6946
dads@dedisys.org
goeschka (at) technikum-wien dot at

Matti Hiltunen
AT&T Shannon Laboratory
1 AT&T Way, Bedminster, NJ 07921
hiltunen (the at sign goes here) research (dot) att (dot) com

Rui Oliveira
Universidade do Minho
Computer Science Department
Campus de Gualtar
4710-057 Braga, Portugal
phone: +351 253 604 452 / Internal: 4452
rco (at) di dot uminho dot pt

Program Committee

TBD.

Important Dates

September 26, 2025 (11:59PM Pacific Time)	Paper submission
October 31, 2025	Author notification
December 5, 2025	Camera-ready papers
December 12, 2025	Author registration

Submission Instructions

Authors are invited to submit original research not previously published, nor currently submitted elsewhere. Papers are welcome in all areas of Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems. Submission of the same paper to multiple tracks is prohibited. For submission, maximum lenght is ten (10) pages and minimum length is four (4) pages.

All papers must initially be submitted as regular papers in PDF format using the submission link on the SAC web page. There is no separate submission track for poster papers.

Student research abstracts (limited to 4 pages in camera-ready format, included in the registration fee. No extra pages allowed) are submitted in PDF format using the separate SRC submission link - for details please refer to the Student Research Competition (SRC) Program on the SAC web page.

The required format for the submission is the ACM SIG Proceedings Alternate Style. Please apply the ACM Computing Classification categories and terms. The template below provides space for this indexing. The ACM Computing Classification scheme can be found at https://www.acm.org/publications/class-2012.

Papers undergo a double-blind review: The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must NOT appear in the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. Only the title should be shown at the first page without the author's information. Please refer to the author kit at the SAC conference site.

Based on the outcome of the review process, some submissions — although technically sound — may not be accepted as regular papers due to overall acceptance rate constraints. In such cases, the auhtors will be invited to a poster paper instead.

Final Manuscript Page Limits:

Regular Papers (accepted for publication): Up to eight (8) pages are included with standard registration. Authors may include up to two (2) additional pages, subject to the extra page charges specified on the registration website. The maximum allowable length is ten (10) pages.
Poster Papers (recommended for acceptance): Up to two (2) pages are included with standard registration. One (1) additional page may be included, subject to an extra page charge. The maximum allowable length is three (3) pages.

Accepted papers will be published in the annual conference proceedings and will be included in the ACM digital library. Paper registration is required, allowing the inclusion of the paper, poster, or SRC abstract in the conference proceedings. An author or a proxy attending SAC MUST present the paper. This is a requirement for including the work in the ACM/IEEE digital library. No-show of registered papers, posters, and SRC abstracts will result in excluding them from the ACM/IEEE digital library.

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: dads@dedisys.org

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This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period. This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.