Mobisys workflow

MobiSys Workflow

Use this as the project-management skill for a MobiSys submission. Replace every date with the current official timetable and work backward from the one hard December cutoff on the mobisys<yy>.hotcrp.com/deadlines page.

MobiSys is a conference, not a journal: no standing editor-in-chief, no article-processing charge. The rotating leadership is the per-edition General Chairs and Program Chairs (2026 General Chairs: Fahim Kawsar and Cecilia Mascolo; Program Chairs 待核实). Committees rotate yearly — re-check the current organizing-committee page rather than carrying a name forward.

The one-deadline calendar

Unlike MobiCom and NSDI, which run two deadlines a year, MobiSys runs a single paper deadline in early December feeding the following June conference. There is no second gate this cycle to catch a slip. That single fact governs the whole plan: the device experiments must be finished, not started, before December.

Milestones

• Venue fit: confirm the contribution is a mobile/embedded system whose device behavior is the result (mobisys-topic-selection).
• Evidence lock: freeze the system design and finish the on-device measurement campaign — energy, latency, memory, thermal, and any deployment/user study.
• Paper registration: register title, abstract, authors, and conflicts on HotCRP before the registration cutoff that precedes the paper upload.
• Paper deadline: upload the anonymous 12-page double-column PDF and required HotCRP fields.
• Round-1 outcome: early-reject notifications go out; survivors proceed to round 2.
• Round-2 reviews + rebuttal: read reviews, then draft a scope-limited rebuttal (mobisys-author-response).
• Notification: archive reviews, rebuttal, and decision.
• Acceptance: prepare the ACM camera-ready, artifact-evaluation submission, registration, and the June in-person talk and demo.

Backward plan from the December deadline

Weeks out (heuristic)	Mobile-systems milestone
12+	System built; measurement harness and power instrument working end to end
8	On-device runs complete on all target devices; energy/latency logged with provenance
6	Deployment or user study done if the claim is a service
4	Full draft sitting in the 12-page ACM double-column template
3	Internal mock review by a systems reader; break-condition experiment added
2	Anonymity sweep including device/trace giveaways; artifact package smoke-tested
1	Numbers regenerated from logs so PDF and artifact cannot diverge
0	Registration then paper on HotCRP before the UTC cutoff

These offsets are planning heuristics only — anchor each to the current official timetable, never to a previous cycle's calendar.

Failure modes by stage

• Starting device measurement in November forces single-device, single-run results that read as under-evaluated — the classic MobiSys evidence reject.
• Leaving format conversion to the final week surfaces overflow late; the 12-page double-column budget is tighter than a working draft once figures are placed.
• Skipping the mock review forfeits the only chance to hear "your energy boundary is undefined" from a colleague instead of a reviewer.
• Building the artifact after the paper deadline forfeits the ACM badges, which need a working script-first package the AEC can run on its own machines (mobisys-artifact-evaluation).

Coordination notes

• Assign one named owner for the on-device measurement provenance and another for the anonymity sweep; shared ownership is how both slip.
• Archive the exact submitted PDF, supplement, and artifact commit, since rebuttal replies must quote them precisely and camera-ready must match the reviewed version.
• Because a miss costs a full year, decide the go/no-go on evidence completeness by the four-week mark, not on deadline night.

Output format

[Current stage] idea / building / measuring / writing / registration / submitted / rebuttal / accepted
[Next official deadline] <date and source, or unknown>
[Critical path] <three tasks that determine readiness>
[Risk register] <device evidence / page budget / anonymity / artifact / one-deadline slip>
[Owner map] <task -> person or role>