Welcome to the 37th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2018), held July 23-27, 2018, at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, United Kingdom. This year's symposium continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research on all aspects of distributed computing, including the theory, design, implementation, and applications of distributed algorithms, systems, and networks.
This volume contains 41 regular papers and 18 brief announcements selected by the Program Committee for presentation at PODC 2018, as well as the abstracts of three keynote lectures - by Robert Peglar, Graham Cormode, and Keren Censor-Hillel - and four tutorials. The volume also includes the citations for two awards jointly sponsored by PODC and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC): the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, and the Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award.
The 2018 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, was presented at PODC 2018 to Bowen Alpern and Fred B. Schneider for their paper Defining Liveness, and the 2018 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award will be presented at DISC 2018 in New Orleans, LA, USA, to Rati Gelashvili, for his dissertation titled On the Complexity of Synchronization, written under the supervision of Prof. Nir Shavit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This year, 163 regular papers and 13 brief announcements were submitted to the symposium, where some regular submissions asked to be considered also as brief announcements. The Program Committee accepted 41 papers and 18 brief announcements that cover a wide variety of topics. Every submitted paper was read and evaluated by at least three reviewers. The final decisions regarding acceptance were made in a meeting held on April 23-24 2018 at Yahoo Research, Oath, in Haifa, in which most Program Committee members participated via videoconferencing. Revised and expanded versions of a few selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the journal Distributed Computing and in the Journal of the ACM.
The Best Paper Award was presented to Leonid Barenboim, Michael Elkin, and Uri Goldenberg for their paper Locally-Iterative Distributed (Δ)-Coloring below Szegedy-Vishwanathan Barrier, and Applications to Self-Stabilization and to Restricted-Bandwidth Models. The Best Student Paper Award was shared between two papers; it was jointly awarded to Guy Goren for his paper Silence coauthored with Yoram Moses; and Thibault Rieutord and Yuan He for their paper An Asynchronous Computability Theorem for Fair Adversaries co-authored with Petr Kuznetsov.
Six workshops were co-located with PODC: BDA - Biological Distributed Algorithms, BTT - Workshop on Blockchain Technology and Theory, SISOSN - Workshop on Social Issues in Online Social Networks, ApPlied - Advanced tools, programming languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems, LADIS - Workshop on Large- Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware, and TOPIC - Theory and Practice for Integrated Cloud, Fog and Edge Computing Paradigms. In addition, the 60th birthday of Jennifer Welch was celebrated via five talks highlighting her contributions to the theory of distributed computation and the impact of her work.
