New and Emerging IdeasICSA 2025

Call for Papers

The goal of the New and Emerging Ideas (NEMI) track at ICSA is to encourage the software architecture community to propose new software architecture research visions and ideas, which can potentially challenge the status quo of the software architecture discipline (research and practice) and point to new directions and opportunities.

The ICSA 2025 NEMI track seeks the following types of contributions:

New Ideas

• Visions or exciting new directions supported by a robust and well-motivated scientific foundation or practical application with concrete plans going forward
• Arguments or results that challenge established results or beliefs, providing evidence that calls for fundamentally new directions, opening up new research avenues or software architecture practices
• Thought-provoking reflections, bold and unexpected results, and reflections that can help us look at current research directions in a new light, calling for new directions for future research; bold revisits of current research directions that may be somehow misguided
• Radically new approaches, techniques, or theories that can bring new results to software architecture research or practice; may have yet to be supported by solid experimental results, but are nonetheless supported by strong and well-argued scientific intuitions as well as concrete plans going forward

Emerging Results

• Not yet fully mature research results, which may lack full validation however they should be supported by initial evidence. These initial results should point to important scientific novelty or gaps that can stimulate reflection.
• Startling new results that come in conflict with established results or beliefs, supporting a call for fundamentally new research directions
• Papers that trigger discussion and raise awareness and reflection on specific topics in research and/or practice

Scope of NEMI Track

NEMI provides a forum for innovative, thought-provoking insights in software architecture to accelerate the exposure of the community to early and ongoing yet promising and potentially inspiring innovations in both industry and academia. A NEMI track paper is not just a scaled-down version of an ICSA research track paper. The NEMI track is reserved for first-class contributions that provide novel, soundly motivated directions and emerging results in research and practice.

In principle, the track addresses the same software architecture topics of interest as those of the research track. However, NEMI authors are encouraged to combine those topics in new ways to establish connections to other fields outside of classical software architecture, push the boundaries of software architecture to new avenues, as well as to argue for the importance of software architecture research and practice in areas not explicitly listed.

Out of Scope

A NEMI submission should not be just incremental results on existing research, nor disguised advertisements for previously published results, products, tools or methods, or experience reports. ICSA 2025 offers several tracks and workshops where such work can be submitted for the benefits of the ICSA community.

Expected Content

NEMI papers must clearly motivate and illustrate a rationale for changing current practice and/or research in software architecture. Evaluation results are not required for NEMI papers (but if such results exist, they may be presented if only to give the reviewers insights into the evaluation plan). Strong argumentation and reasoning are expected to inspire the readers.

Papers must include, in the abstract and the introduction, a clear statement about the claimed contribution, i.e., “New Ideas”or “Emerging Results”.

NEMI submissions must include a section titled “Discussion”, including a critical reflection on the new idea or emerging results that explicitly addresses relevant aspects for discussion during the conference. These aspects include, for example, the potential societal impact of the vision, ideas, and/or results proposed; alternatives and their pros and cons in comparison with the proposal; aspects going beyond technical barriers that may affect the feasibility of the submitted proposal, and others. Finally, we require all submissions to the NEMI track to include a section titled “Future Plans”, where the authors outline the work they plan on doing to turn their new idea or emerging results into a full-length paper in the future.

Evaluation

Each submission will be reviewed and evaluated in terms of the following quality criteria:

• Value: the problem is worth exploring, ideally inspired by real-world use;
• Impact: the potential for disruption of current practice and/or research;
• Originality: the novelty of insights or ideas/visions; the extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art;
• Scholarship: appropriate consideration of the current literature;
• Evaluation: appropriate consideration of relevant literature and/or research evaluation to demonstrate originality, arguments, and limitations; and
• Quality: overall manuscript quality and how the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ICSA, including explicit descriptions, as well as adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions

New Ideas will also be evaluated based on: Rationale: soundness of the justification, reasoning, and argumentation

Emerging Results will also be evaluated based on: Evaluation: initial evidence; appropriate consideration of relevant literature and/or research evaluation to demonstrate originality, arguments, and limitations

Formatting and Submission

All NEMI submissions must conform to the author Instructions (including the instructions under “Expected Content” above) and must not exceed 5 pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures. No double-blind, but single-blind review will apply to NEMI papers. All papers must be submitted electronically via EasyChair (track: ICSA 2025 New and Emerging Ideas) , by the submission deadline. Submissions must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration for ICSA 2023 NEMI track. Note that in addition to an oral plenary presentation at the conference, authors of accepted papers may also bring a poster describing their work further to showcase their work to a broader ICSA audience.

Important Dates

• Paper Submission: Dec 20, 2024
• Notification of Acceptance: Jan 20, 2025
• Camera-ready Submission: Jan 27, 2025

Publication and Attendance

All accepted contributions will be published in ICSA 2025 Companion proceedings and will appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Note that at least one author of an accepted contribution is required to register and present the work at the conference. In the absence of restrictions, an in-person presentation is required. All submissions must conform to the IEEE paper formatting and submission instructions and must not exceed 5 pages. The submissions must conform to the author instructions as well as to the IEEE Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Text

All papers are to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair (track: ICSA 2025 New and Emerging Ideas) submission system by the submission deadline, and must not have been published before or be submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration at ICSA. All submissions will be checked with an anti-plagiarism tool.

New and Emerging Ideas Track Chairs

Patrizia Scandurra, University of Bergamo, Italy
Antonio Martini, University of Oslo, Norway