Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
Name	Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
Abbreviation	HotOS
Discipline	Computer science
Established	1997
Country	International
Frequency	Biennial/irregular

Contents

Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

The Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems is a recurring forum that convenes researchers from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Cambridge to discuss emerging challenges in systems research. It attracts participants from organizations including Google, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Intel, and Amazon as well as representatives from conferences like USENIX, ACM SIGOPS, ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and ACM SOSP. The workshop fosters cross-pollination among projects associated with laboratories and initiatives at DARPA, National Science Foundation, European Research Council, Microsoft Research Redmond, and Google DeepMind.

Overview

HotOS is conceived as a focused venue where investigators affiliated with Princeton University, Harvard University, University of Toronto, ETH Zurich, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne present position papers, prototypes, and experimental results. Sessions often feature contributors from Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Nokia Bell Labs, Oracle, and Facebook alongside participants from startups spun out of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Berkeley RISELab, and SRI International. The program committee typically includes faculty and researchers associated with awards such as the Turing Award, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Grace Murray Hopper Award, and SIGOPS Hall of Fame inductees.

The workshop traces origins to late-1990s gatherings where scholars from University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Cornell University, and Columbia University sought venues alternative to ACM SOSP and USENIX OSDI. Early editions featured participants linked to projects at Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Bell Labs Research, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Over time the workshop engaged stakeholders from funding agencies like DARPA Information Innovation Office, NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, European Commission, and institutions such as The Alan Turing Institute.

Recurring themes have included discussions influenced by research at MIT CSAIL, UC Santa Barbara, University of Michigan, University of California, San Diego, and Georgia Institute of Technology on subjects like operating systems scalability, influenced by work at Google Research and Facebook AI Research, virtualization advances from VMware and Xen Project, and security concerns echoed in findings from CERT Coordination Center, SANS Institute, and IETF. Other threads draw on infrastructures at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack Foundation, and projects originating at Kubernetes and Docker, Inc.. Emerging topics have intersected with initiatives from RISC-V International, ARM Holdings, Intel Labs, NVIDIA Research, and Broadcom.

The workshop is organized by committees comprising academics from University of Maryland, College Park, Rice University, Duke University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Purdue University together with industry program chairs from Intel Corporation, AMD, Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, and HP Labs. Formats typically combine short talks, poster sessions, panels, and breakout discussions modeled after gatherings at NeurIPS, SIGGRAPH, CHI, and Usenix Annual Technical Conference. Proceedings have been distributed in conjunction with sponsors such as ACM Digital Library, USENIX Association, IEEE Computer Society, and publishers linked to Springer and Elsevier.

Specific editions gained attention when papers intersected with efforts at DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, Google Fuchsia, Microsoft Singularity, IBM Watson, and projects at MITRE Corporation. Proceedings have highlighted work citing or followed up by research at Stanford DAWN Project, Berkeley RISELab, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Oxford University Computing Laboratory, and Cambridge Computer Laboratory. High-impact contributions later referenced by ACM SIGMOD, IEEE INFOCOM, USENIX Security Symposium, and ACM EuroSys trace back to HotOS discussions and drafts.

The workshop has catalyzed collaborations that led to systems appearing in production at Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well as open-source projects maintained by communities at Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenStack Foundation, and FreeBSD Foundation. Ideas incubated at HotOS have informed standards and implementations tied to IETF, W3C, IEEE 802, and hardware innovations by Intel, ARM, and RISC-V International. Alumni of the workshop have been recipients of honors including the Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, IEEE John von Neumann Medal, and MacArthur Fellowship.

Participation spans doctoral students and faculty from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Technical University of Munich, Imperial College London, National University of Singapore, and Peking University alongside engineers from Qualcomm, Broadcom, Samsung Research, and Tencent. Community activities include mentorship programs, special sessions modeled on Women in Data Science, collaborations with societies like ACM SIGOPS, IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems, and student-focused events reminiscent of ACM Student Research Competition.

Future directions link to interdisciplinary work with research centers such as Microsoft Research Cambridge, Google Brain, OpenAI, DeepMind, and national initiatives funded by NSF and European Research Council that explore operating systems for heterogeneous computing, security for distributed ledgers influenced by Ethereum Foundation and Hyperledger, and operating abstractions for emerging hardware from NVIDIA, Intel Labs, and ARM Holdings. Anticipated themes include integration with projects at Kubernetes, Apache Hadoop, TensorFlow, PyTorch Foundation, and policy intersections involving institutions like OECD and European Commission.