CALL FOR INDUSTRY PAPERS

The annual ACM Middleware conference is a major forum for the discussion of innovations and recent advances in the design, construction and use of middleware systems. The Industrial Track of the Middleware 2026 Conference solicits 6-page papers for presentation during the main conference (single track) and inclusion in the ACM Digital Library. The topics of interest are similar to those in the general conference call for papers. However, the purpose of the Industrial Track is to emphasize the practical issues, observations, and measurements of “real-world” systems and applications and to disseminate information of particular interest to middleware researchers, architects, developers and administrators. Submissions should have at least one author who is from industry.

Middleware 2026 Industrial Track Co-Chairs

Aleksander Slominski, IBM Research, USA

Javier Picorel, Huawei Research, Germany

Eduard Marin, Telefonica, Spain

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Full Paper Submission: August 24, 2026
  • Author Notification: October 4, 2026
  • Camera Ready Deadline: October 24, 2026

TOPICS

The topics of the industry track include, but are not limited to:

  • Approaches, mechanisms and tools for
    • Real-life deployment, e.g., hardware equipment management (installation, updates, replacement), management of data center buildings, network points of presence, “data center in-a-box”
    • DevOps systems for continuous software development, integration, and delivery
    • Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) systems and software architecture, including continuous ML deployment & delivery
    • MLOps systems for data and ML model management; including version control and traceability (accountability, causality, and fairness) from data to model to inference
    • Middleware for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with software systems
    • Operation and maintenance, e.g., install and upgrade, bug fixes, configurations and backup
    • Runtime management, e.g., monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and remediation
    • Economic, energy-aware, and environmental analyses (e.g. cost and/or energy impacts of various data center deployment models)
    • Security management, e.g., intrusion detection, and key management
    • System and software requirements and their relations AI/ML modeling
    • Data management middleware for both exploratory and explanatory data analytics
    • The use of generative AI in middleware and middleware for generative AI
    • Serverless and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms
    • Networking, network function virtualization (NFV), and software-defined networking (SDN)
    • AI agent orchestration and multi-agent middleware, e.g., frameworks for coordinating multiple LLM-based agents including planning, communication, and delegation
    • Runtime infrastructure for AI agents, e.g., sandboxing, tool execution environments, permission models, and resource management for autonomous AI agents
    • AI coding harnesses and agentic development tools, e.g., middleware for autonomous code generation, editing, testing, and deployment including context management and verification loops
    • Middleware for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and context management for LLM-based applications
    • Guardrails, safety middleware, and human-in-the-loop systems for AI agents, e.g., permission classifiers, action approval workflows, and safety mechanisms
  • Experience reports and measurements relating to
    • Deployments of Internet-scale environments, including grids, data centers, and other large-scale systems
    • Cloud computing middleware, for Infrastructure/Platform/Application as a Service Quality of service, quality of user experience
    • Scalability issues (e.g., observed real-life workloads and applications)
    • Reliability and availability issues (observed real-life faults, fault models, and recovery mechanisms)
    • Security issues (e.g., real attacks on deployed platforms and their impacts)
    • Middleware in big data and machine learning systems and applications
    • Deployments of embedded systems, sensor networks and Internet of Things
    • Deployments of blockchain-based middleware and applications
    • AI, accelerators for deep learning, and use cases leveraging it, such as self-driving cars and others
    • Deployments of AI agent systems and coding assistants at scale, e.g., observations on latency, reliability, cost, context management, and user experience in production agentic systems

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

A submission must be a single PDF file conforming to the formatting instructions of the ACM SIGCONF style, which can be found on the ACM template page, and must not exceed 6 pages (including abstract, figures, tables, and appendices, but excluding references). The font size has to be set to 9pt. Submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines or that violate formatting will be declined without review. Reviewing is single-blind; papers must include author names and affiliations. Authors are required to add “(Industry Track)” at the end of their paper title.

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the Industrial Track Program Committee. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, technical soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. The committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. The conference organizers, like those of other scientific conferences and journals, prohibit these practices and may take actions against authors who have committed them. Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. If you are uncertain whether your submission meets the guidelines, please contact the program co-chairs.

By submitting a paper, you agree that at least one of the authors will attend the conference and present the paper in person.

Please submit papers to HotCRP.
For the camera-ready instructions, please visit the camera-ready instructions page.

Program Committee

TBA

The Middleware conference adheres strictly to the ACM policies against discrimination and harassment.