Abstract :
This year\´s DCCS program consists of 34 excellent papers (out of 187 submissions) that cover a wide range of dependability issues and show the depth and breadth of our community\´s research efforts. This excellent collection is the result of a very thorough selection process, one of the most competitive in the history of this conference. As a testament to the diversity of our community, this year the symposium received contributions from 25 countries and, continuing a trend observed in the last few years, over 15% of the submissions had multinational author lists. Most contributions were from universities and government research organizations; industrial submission were responsible for about 10% of the total, while twice as many submissions were the product of collaborations between industry and academia. The review process followed the tradition of thoroughness that has come to be expected from this conference. The program committee members suggested external reviewers for the regular papers in early December. The rate of completed reviews from the 225 external reviewers exceeded 99% of our goals. In total, 933 reviews were produced for the 187 submissions. These reviews were discussed in a program committee meeting, held in Austin in the middle of February, that, despite the disruptions caused by blizzards on the East coast of the United States, was attended by 44 of the 47 PC members (the missing three were "virtually" present through conference calls). Each regular paper was reviewed by 3 program committee members and up to 4 external reviewers; over 97% of regular papers had 5 or more reviews, with an average of 5.13 reviews per paper. Practical experience reports and software demonstration submissions were each reviewed by 3 committee members.
