LCTES 2023

Welcome to the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES 2023)!

LCTES provides a link between the programming languages and embedded systems engineering communities. Researchers and developers in these areas are addressing many similar problems but with different backgrounds and approaches. LCTES is intended to expose researchers and developers from either area to relevant work and interesting problems in the other area and provide a forum where they can interact.

LCTES’23 is co-located with PLDI and FCRC 2023, sharing the venue and activities with ten top computer science conferences.

Proceedings

The proceedings for LCTES 2023 are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

Attendance policy

Accepted papers must be presented at LCTES 2023 to appear in the proceedings. Since FCRC is an in-person conference, presentations must be in person and the presenter must register for LCTES. Under special circumstances, pre-recorded presentations are allowed but require three virtual PLDI registrations to help us cover the cost of the proceedings. If you are unable to present your paper in person, contact the general chair as soon as possible.

Registration is open

Registrations are now open. Access to LCTES is possible with a 2-day or single-day (Sunday) pass as part of PLDI. Make sure to tick the “LCTES” box when signing up!

Accommodation

Visit the FCRC 2023 hotel information page to book your rooms at a discounted rate.

Conference attendance grants for student authors

If you are a student and a presenter or co-author of a paper but need money to attend the conference, you can apply for a SIGPLAN grant. Visit https://pac.sigplan.org/ to learn more.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Programming languages, compilers, and tools are important interfaces between embedded systems and emerging applications in the real world. Embedded systems are aggressively adapted for deep neural network applications, autonomous vehicles, robots, healthcare applications, etc. However, these emerging applications impose challenges that conflict with conventional design requirements and increase the complexity of embedded system designs. Furthermore, they exploit new hardware paradigms to scale up multicores (including GPUs and FPGAs) and distributed systems built from many cores. Therefore, programming languages, compilers, and tools are becoming more important to address these issues, such as productivity, validation, verification, maintainability, safety, and reliability for meeting both performance goals and resource constraints.

The 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, Tools and Theory of Embedded Systems (LCTES 2023) solicits papers presenting original work on programming languages, compilers, tools, theory, and architectures that help in overcoming these challenges. Research papers on innovative techniques are welcome, as well as experience papers on insights obtained by experimenting with real-world systems and applications. Papers can be submitted to https://lctes23.hotcrp.com/.

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: March 24, 2023 (extended firm deadline)
• Paper notification: April 24, 2023
• AE submission deadline: May 1, 2023
• AE notification: May 12, 2023
• Camera-ready deadline: May 15, 2023
• Conference: June 18, 2023

Paper Categories

• Full paper: 10 pages presenting original work.
• Work-in-progress paper: 4 pages papers presenting original ideas that are likely to trigger interesting discussions.

Accepted papers in both categories will appear in the proceedings published by ACM. In addition, this year’s LCTES introduces two journal modes.

• All accepted full papers will be invited to be published in a special issue of the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS). A TECS publication will require substantial additional material over the conference publication and will undergo a separate review process.
• Rejected full papers may have the option to submit their work to the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters (ESL; 4 pages). IEEE ESL submissions will undergo a separate review process.

Original contributions are solicited on the topics of interest including, but not limited to:

Programming language challenges

• Domain-specific languages
• Features to exploit multicore, reconfigurable, and other emerging architectures
• Features for distributed, adaptive, and real-time control embedded systems
• Capabilities for specification, composition, and construction of embedded systems
• Language features and techniques to enhance reliability, verifiability, and security
• Virtual machines, concurrency, inter-processor synchronization, and memory management

Compiler challenges

• Interaction between embedded architectures, operating systems, and compilers
• Interpreters, binary translation, just-in-time compilation, and split compilation
• Support for enhanced programmer productivity
• Support for enhanced debugging, profiling, and exception/interrupt handling
• Optimization for low power/energy, code/data size, and real-time performance
• Parameterized and structural compiler design space exploration and auto-tuning
• Tools for analysis, specification, design, and implementation, including:
• Hardware, system software, application software, and their interfaces
• Distributed real-time control, media players, and reconfigurable architectures
• System integration and testing
• Performance estimation, monitoring, and tuning
• Run-time system support for embedded systems
• Design space exploration tools
• Support for system security and system-level reliability
• Approaches for cross-layer system optimization

Theory and foundations of embedded systems

• Predictability of resource behavior: energy, space, time
• Validation and verification, in particular of concurrent and distributed systems
• Formal foundations of model-based design as the basis for code generation, analysis, and verification
• Mathematical foundations for embedded systems
• Models of computations for embedded applications

Novel embedded architectures

• Design and implementation of novel architectures
• Workload analysis and performance evaluation
• Architecture support for new language features, virtualization, compiler techniques, debugging tools
• Architectural features to improve power/energy, code/data size, and predictability

Mobile systems and IoT

• Operating systems for mobile and IoT devices
• Compiler and software tools for mobile and IoT systems
• Energy management for mobile and IoT devices
• Memory and IO techniques for mobile and IoT devices

ACM Publications Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start, and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Authors take note

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submission

Submissions must be in ACM SIGPLAN subformat of the acmart format (available at and explained in more detail at https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author/). Each paper should be in 10pt font and have no more than 10 pages for full papers or 4 pages for work-in-progress papers, excluding the bibliography. There is no limit on the page count for references. Each reference must list all authors of the paper (do not use et al.). The citations should be in numeric style, e.g., [52]. Submissions must be in PDF format and printable on US Letter and A4-sized paper. For papers in the work-in-progress category, add the suffix “(WIP)” to your title, such as “Title (WIP)”.

To enable double-blind reviewing, submissions must adhere to two rules:

• author names and their affiliations must be omitted; and,
• references to related work by the authors should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”).

However, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized). Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as discussed here. Authors of accepted papers will be required to sign an ACM copyright release.

ACM Publications Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy. Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start, and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Submission site

https://lctes23.hotcrp.com

Call for Artifacts

Submission Site

Submit your artifacts through https://lctes23ae.hotcrp.com.

Artifact Submission Deadline: 11:59 pm May 1, 2023 (AoE)
Artifact Decision Notification: May 12, 2023

General Info

The authors of all accepted LCTES papers (including WIP papers) are invited to submit supporting materials to the Artifact Evaluation process. Artifact Evaluation is run by a separate Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC) whose task is to assess how well the artifacts support the work described in the papers. This submission is voluntary but strongly encouraged and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers.

At LCTES, we follow ACM’s artifact review and badging policy, version 1.1. ACM describes a research artifact as follows:

By “artifact” we mean a digital object created by the authors to be used as part of the study or generated by the experiment itself. For example, artifacts can be software systems, scripts used to run experiments, input datasets, raw data collected in the experiment, or scripts used to analyze results.

Submission of an artifact does not imply automatic permission to make its content public. AEC members will be instructed that they may not publicize any part of the submitted artifacts during or after completing the evaluation, and they will not retain any part of any artifact after evaluation. Thus, you can include models, data files, proprietary binaries, and similar items in your artifact.

We expect each artifact to receive three reviews. Papers that pass the Artifact Evaluation process will receive up to three ACM artifact evaluation badge(s) directly printed on the paper and available as meta information in the ACM Digital Library.

Artifact evaluation is single-blind. Please take precautions (e.g., turning off analytics and logging) to help prevent accidentally learning the reviewers’ identities.

Badging

The papers with accepted artifacts will be assigned official ACM artifact evaluation badges based on the criteria defined by ACM. The AEC awards up to three types of badges that reflect the evaluation (red), availability (green), and validation (blue) of the artifact and the results of the paper. Refer to the ACM website for detailed badge information. Note that artifacts will be evaluated with respect to the claims and presentation in the submitted version of the paper, not the camera-ready version.

The awarded badges will appear on the first page of the camera-ready version of the paper. Artifact authors will be allowed to revise their camera-ready paper after being notified of their artifact’s publication to include a link to the artifact’s DOI.

Note that we only award the “Reproducibility” (dark blue) badge but not the “Replication” (light blue) one.

Guidelines

1. Carefully think which badge(s) you seek to receive.
   • If your only goal is to publish your code, seek the “Availability” (green) badge. The reviewers will not exercise the artifact for its functionality or validate the paper’s claims.
   • If you wish you have your results reproduced without making your artifact documented, consistent, complete, and exercisable, seek the “Reproducibility” (blue) badge rather than the “Functionality/Reusability” (red) badge.
   • If you do not want to make the artifact available publicly, do not seek the “Availability” (green) badge.
2. Minimize the artifact setup overhead.
   • A well-packaged artifact is easily usable by the reviewers and conveys the value of your work. A great way to package an artifact is as a VM image or Docker container that runs “out of the box.” We encourage authors to include pre-built binaries along with the source and build scripts that allow the AEC to regenerate the binaries to guarantee maximum transparency. Pre-built VM or docker images are preferred over scripts that build the image since this alleviates reliance on external dependencies. Make sure to test your artifact on at least one machine different than the one you used to prepare the artifact to identify missing dependencies.
   • Giving AE reviewers remote access to your machines with preinstalled (proprietary) software is possible.

Preparing the Artifact

You should make your artifact available as a single archive file and use the naming convention <paper #>.<suffix>, where the appropriate suffix is used for the given archive format. Use a commonly-available compressed archive format such as .tgz, .tbz2, or .zip and open document formats. The link to download your artifact must protect the anonymity of the reviewers (e.g., a Google Drive URL).

The compressed archive should consist of three pieces:

1. The submission version of your accepted paper.
2. A README file (PDF or plaintext format) that explains your artifact (details below).
3. A folder containing the artifact.

The README.txt should consist of two parts:

1. a Getting Started Guide and
2. Step-by-Step Instructions that detail how your artifact can be evaluated. Include appropriate references to the relevant sections of your paper.

The Getting Started Guide should contain instructions on how to set up (including, for example, a pointer to the VM player software, its version, and passwords if needed) and test your artifact. Anyone following this guide should be able to handle the rest of your artifact easily.

The Step by Step Instructions explain how to reproduce experiments or other activities supporting your paper’s conclusions. Write this for readers who are deeply interested in your work and are studying to improve or compare against it. If your artifact runs for more than a few minutes, point this out and explain how to run it on smaller inputs.

Where appropriate, include descriptions of and links to files (included in the archive) that represent the expected outputs such as log files generated by your tool for a given set of inputs. If there are warnings that can be ignored, explain what they are.

Further, include the following:

• A list of claims from the paper supported by the artifact. Explain how and why the artifact supports those claims.
• A list of claims from the paper not supported by the artifact. Explain why the artifact does not support those claims. Examples: performance claims cannot be reproduced in a VM, authors cannot redistribute specific benchmarks, etc.

When preparing your artifact, please keep in mind:

• How accessible you are making your artifact to other researchers.
• The AEC members will have a limited time to assess your artifact.

Artifact Evaluation Committee

Other than the chair, the AEC members are senior graduate students, postdocs, or recent Ph.D. graduates, identified with the help of the LCTES PC and recent artifact evaluation committees. Please check SIGPLAN’s Empirical Evaluation Guidelines for some methodologies to consider during evaluation.

Throughout the review period, reviews will be submitted to HotCRP and continuously visible to authors. AEC reviewers will be able to continuously interact (anonymously) with authors for clarifications, system-specific patches, and other logistics to help ensure that the artifact can be evaluated. Continuous interaction prevents rejecting artifacts for “wrong library version” types of problems.

Our goal is that all submitted artifacts successfully pass the artifact evaluation.

LCTES’23 Speaker’s Guide

This document is for those presenting a paper at LCTES’23. If you’re presenting at ISMM, PLDI, or a PLDI tutorial or workshop, please see the Speaker’s Guide on the page for the corresponding conference/track.

Congratulations on having your paper accepted at LCTES’23! This document will help ensure your presentation runs smoothly and has the best possible audience impact. Please read it in its entirety.

Checklist

Before LCTES:

• Prepare and practice.
• Ensure your talk runs for no more than 15 minutes.
• Sign up for Discord (details here).
• Upload a backup copy of your talk slides (details below).
• Check the program to establish when and where your talk will be.
• Ensure you have a HDMI adaptor for your device.

Before your talk:

• Familiarize yourself with the room you will be speaking in.
• Find and introduce yourself to your session chair.
• Find the Discord channel for your session, so you can monitor questions.
• Attend the mandatory video check before your session (details below).
• Ensure that you are in the room no later than 5 minutes before your session.

After your talk:

• Expect questions from the floor and session chair.
• Once you’ve completed your talk and Q&A, monitor Discord for follow-up questions.

Preparing Your Talk

Your work will have a greater impact if you’re well prepared.

It is very important that you run to schedule. The LCTES’23 schedule is extremely tight, with hard stops imposed by FCRC scheduling. Session chairs have been asked to stick rigidly to the schedule.

Guidelines

1. Your talk should run for no more than 16 minutes , uninterrupted. This gives you about three minutes for questions and one minute for speaker change-over.
2. Your talk should be prepared for the standard 16:9 widescreen ratio. If your talk is in a different ratio, at best it will be pillarboxed, wasting screen real estate and diminishing impact, and at worst, it won’t display correctly.
3. You will present your talk from a lectern, using a fixed lectern mic.
4. You will need to provide your talk ahead of time in either pdf or powerpoint.
5. If you have an embedded video in your presentation, please inform the video team via Discord and be sure to test it with them before your session.

Uploading Your Presentation

As an insurance against technical failures, we ask all speakers to make a backup copy of their presentation available to the video team by uploading it the day before the session. You’re welcome to upload fresh copies at any time.

• Format: your presentation must be saved as a powerpoint or pdf file (sorry!)
• Naming: you must use your paper ID as your file name (<LCTES paper ID>.[ppt,pptx,pdf], e.g., LCTES-paper43.pptx)
• Location: please use this link: https://bit.ly/pldi23upload

This requirement gives you assurance that if some major technical problem were to arise (such as a failure of your laptop), you will still be able to give your talk. If you do not make your presentation available in advance, and significant technical problems arise, we may have to shorten your presentation to keep to our tight schedule.

The requirement for you to use pdf or powerpoint for your backup copy is a pragmatic tradeoff. These slides will only be used in case of a technical emergency. We want to have the highest possible assurance that they will work without fuss on a third party device should such an emergency occur. If you use Google slides, Keynote, or some other software, please use the export feature to create either powerpoint or pdf backups.

If you elect not to upload a backup copy, please understand that this limits our volunteers’ capacity to assist you if a technical problem arises when you give your presentation.

Advice

There are many excellent sources of advice on giving good talks, including from Simon Peyton Jones, Michael Hicks, Michael Ernst, and Derek Dreyer. Make good use of these!

Mandatory Video Check

All speakers are required to be in the room and check in with their session chair and the video team no later than 5 minutes before their session starts. Please note that due to our very tight schedule, speakers who fail to upload their talk in advance and/or fail to attend the video check 5 minutes before their session may have their talk cut short if technical issues arise.

Q&A

If you stick to the above schedule you will have about 3 minutes for questions. The in-room audience will be able to ask questions via a queue at a single microphone on a mic stand in the center of the room. In-room attendees and remote attendees will also be able to ask questions via Discord. Your session chair will monitor questions on Discord and might ask questions as they see them appearing there.

It is good practice, as the speaker, to repeat your understanding of the question before providing your answer. This is particularly important when time is tight because it reduces opportunities for time being wasted on account of a misunderstanding.

Once your talk is finished, please go on to Discord and respond to any questions or follow-up questions that appear there.

Remote Audience

Your talk will be streamed to Discord and YouTube with live captioning. Your remote audience will be able to write questions in the Discord channel created for your session (they won’t be able to ask questions via audio or video). They should see your slides, a video feed of you speaking, and live captions. As mentioned above, your session chair may relay questions from Discord.

Remote Presenters

LCTES’23 authors are expected to be present at the conference. If it is impossible for any of the authors to attend LCTES in person, please let the chairs know immediately.

Discord

We will use Discord as the virtual platform for this conference. You should familiarize yourself with Discord as an audience member well before your talk. We will use it for: a) the remote audience, b) delivery of remote talks, and c) communicating logistics.

Remote speakers will receive instructions on how to present your talk over Discord.

Connectivity

Please do the best you can to ensure that you have good connectivity at the time of your presentation. To protect against the possibility of a major technical failure, we encourage you to record a 15 minute video version of your talk, and share it with the video team well before your talk (see notes above for sharing slides). The video team can then use your video as a back-up in case of a major problem.

Limitations

Remote speakers should take care before including embedded audio in their talk. While this is possible, it can be difficult. If you need to do this, please consult directly with the video team and have it tested well in advance.

Q&A

Your session chair will introduce you and field questions just as for in-person sessions. You do not need to monitor Discord during your talk. Your Q&A will involve answering questions verbally, just as for in-person talks, only you’ll do so via video. As with in-person sessions, timing is very tight, so please be sure to stick to your 15 minute speaking time, or risk losing your Q&A time. You can respond to follow-up questions online after your talk has finished.

Accessing Papers

PLDI papers are all open-access and available from the ACM Digital Library. Just follow the small “DOI” link in the PLDI schedule below the paper.

In-Person Attendees

The venue for PLDI’23 is Orlando World Center Marriott.

The map here indicates where you’ll find key events.

Registration

Please make your way to the FCRC registration desk, which will be in “Palms Registration” until Saturday noon, at which point it will move to " Cypress 2 Alcove" for the remainder of FCRC. Both are marked on the map above.

Welcome Reception

We are holding a joint welcome reception with ISCA in Royal from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm on Sunday. Everyone registered for PLDI (or ISCA) is invited.

Catering

Lunch and breakfast will be in Cypress 3, with the exception of Monday’s PLDI Awards Lunch, which will be held in Cypress 1.

Wi-Fi

FCRC provides wifi for the whole event. You should receive information on how to access it at the registration desk.

Discord

In-person attendees are warmly encouraged to use Discord (details below). You can use it to coordinate with colleagues, get updates on activities, and engage with authors via Q&A. You are very welcome to ask questions via each session’s text channel on Discord, before, during, and after the talk. If the session chair has time, they will ask the question on your behalf. Authors have been asked to check their channel for questions, so you can engage with the authors that way if not in person.

Virtual Attendees

Watching Talks (YouTube)

LCTES will be streamed to YouTube, and accessible to everyone (Tutorials are not streamed by our video team, but organizers may have made their own arrangements).

Each session will be streamed separately. The link to LCTES live stream will be visible at the top of the LCTES Discord channel and in the schedule.

We have paid for live subtitling of the main PLDI tracks.

Engaging in Q&A (Discord)

We encourage remote attendees to engage with talks via Discord (details below in the “Using Discord” section).

Using Discord

As an affiliated conference, LCTES will use PLDI’s Discord server for virtual engagement. Discord is a social media platform that supports text, voice, and video chats. This section of the guide gives a brief overview of how we’ll use it and pointers to more general tips on how to use Discord.

Key information:

• Our conference is completely open and free for virtual attendees, so our Discord server is open to everyone.
• Please use this link to join the PLDI’23 Discord server.
• You can use Discord entirely from the browser, or via an app you install.
• We have one channel for each technical session. Use that channel to engage virtually with the authors and other attendees.
• We ask everyone to edit their profile to set their “server nickname” to their preferred name, and their pronouns (if they wish). Updating your avatar with a profile photo can also help improve the virtual experience.

Editing Your Profile

You first need to open user settings. At the lower left corner, you should see a small icon with your avatar and your Discord username, with a gear symbol to the right of it. If you click on the gear icon, it will open user settings.

On the left-hand side, you’ll see menu options. Select “Profiles”.

First, update your nickname. Under “Profiles”, select the “Server Profiles” tab, and ensure that the server is “PLDI 2023” under “Choose a server” like this, and then edit your “Server Nickname” to be your preferred name, including your pronouns if you wish.

Next, update your avatar if you wish. Under “Profiles”, select “User Profile” and under “Avatar” select “Change Avatar”.

Click on the “X” at the top right to exit the user settings dialogue.

PLDI’s Discord Setup

The most important thing to know is that we’ll have a text channel for each session, and that’s the place to go to engage with the speakers at that session. You’ll find them listed under “PLDI MAIN TRACK”, “ISMM & LCTES”, and “WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS” respectively, as shown here. You’ll see one channel per session for PLDI, ISMM, and LCTES and one per event for the workshops and tutorials.

You’ll also find links to these channels on the program, such as the link to #pldi-mon-0900-opening-royal in this example screenshot.

We also have a number of other channels, including ones for general questions (#general) and for social events.

Discord Etiquette

To help make the platform friendly and engaging, we encourage you to clearly identify yourself (see notes above on editing your profile).

PLDI is committed to creating a safe and respectful environment for everyone. This includes conversations on Discord. Please be respectful and kind in your interactions on Discord.

Discord for talk Q&A

You can use Discord to ask questions of the authors, before the talk, during the talk, and after the talk, whether you are on-site or remote. When time permits, during each live post-talk Q&A, session chairs will be able to consult Discord and read questions on behalf of the person who posted it. Authors are encouraged to go to Discord after their talk and respond to follow-up questions.

How to Use Discord

The basic use of the text channels is quite straightforward.

Rather than attempting to provide a first-principles guide on how to use Discord in this document, we encourage you to check out the following references:

• “How to Use Discord: A Beginner’s Guide” by Boone Ashworth of Wired.
• “Beginner’s Guide to Discord” from Discord.
• “How to Use Discord: A Beginner’s Guide” by Marshall Gunnell of PCWorld.