Brazilian Symposium on Computing System Engineering, SBESC

About Brazilian Symposium on Computing System Engineering, SBESC

Brazilian Symposium on Computing Systems Engineering (SBESC) — Brazil's Meeting for Computing Systems Engineering

The Brazilian Symposium on Computing Systems Engineering, known everywhere in its community by the acronym SBESC (from the Portuguese Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Sistemas Computacionais), is an annual Brazilian scientific symposium — a conference, not a journal — devoted to the engineering of computing systems: operating systems, embedded systems, real-time systems and the critical systems built from them. Its name appears in journal directories in the variant form "Brazilian Symposium on Computing System Engineering," but the community's own English name uses the plural "Systems," and this profile follows the community. SBESC papers are published in the symposium's electronic proceedings; papers written in English and presented at the meeting have been published through IEEE's Conference Publishing Services and submitted to IEEE Xplore, which is why the proceedings behave, for citation purposes, much like an IEEE conference series. There is no journal Impact Factor and no article processing charge to describe here, because neither concept applies to a symposium of this kind — and this profile will not invent either one.

SBESC exists because of a change in what computing systems are. As its own call for papers explains, modern computing systems are increasingly diversified — systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous systems — many of them embedded, many subject to real-time constraints, and most of them running an operating system. Engineering such systems safely, correctly and to deadline is a multidisciplinary craft that no single older Brazilian workshop covered whole. SBESC was created to cover it whole, and understanding that founding bargain — three established workshops merging their communities into one symposium — explains both its topics and its culture.

Origins: three workshops, then four communities, one symposium

SBESC was an initiative of the research community originally associated with three events: the Operating Systems Workshop (WSO, Workshop de Sistemas Operacionais), the Embedded Systems Workshop (WSE, Workshop de Sistemas Embarcados) and the Real-Time Systems Workshop (WTR, Workshop de Sistemas de Tempo Real). The organisers state the reasoning plainly: the three communities recognised a strong synergy among their areas, and the design of computing systems had become an increasingly multidisciplinary task that the separate workshops no longer matched. The first SBESC was held in 2011 at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianópolis, in the auditorium of the Rectory, with proceedings subsequently available in IEEE Xplore and a selected-papers issue in the ACM Operating Systems Review. Its keynotes that year — Scott Brandt, Gernot Heiser and Andreas Gerstlauer — signalled the intended level: operating systems, embedded systems and real-time research of international standing, hosted by a Brazilian community.

Two later changes shaped the modern symposium. From 2013, the Brazilian Conference on Critical Embedded Systems (CBSEC) also became part of SBESC, adding the safety- and certification-conscious community that works on embedded systems whose failure is not an option. And from 2015, SBESC abandoned its division into separate tracks inherited from the founding workshops, presenting instead a single broad list of topics of interest covering the main aspects of the original tracks. That decision is the symposium in miniature: the point of SBESC is the integration — a schedulability analysis, an operating-system mechanism and a hardware–software co-design for the same drone, car or medical device belong in the same room. The symposium has also travelled: editions after Florianópolis included Natal (2012), Niterói (2013) and Manaus (2014), and it has been co-located with companion events such as the Embedded Systems School (ESSE), the Embedded Systems Competition and, in 2017, Robotica. The symposium's long-running web home is hosted by LISHA, the Software/Hardware Integration Lab at UFSC (sbesc.lisha.ufsc.br), whose archive of past editions is the most complete public record of the meeting.

Aims and scope: the topics of interest

SBESC's published topic list, stable in its essentials across editions, is the best single description of its scope. It covers: applications, including automotive, avionics and aerospace; control and automation; design methodologies, languages and tools; distributed systems; electronic system level, synthesis and co-design; fault tolerance and dependability; formal methods and verification; Internet of Things, mobile and ubiquitous computing; multiprocessor, multicore and manycore systems; networking and communication protocols; performance evaluation and optimisation; power-, energy- and thermal-aware systems; quality of service; resource management; run-time support systems, including virtualisation, storage and file systems; scheduling and schedulability analysis; security; verification, validation and test of systems; wireless sensor networks; and worst-case execution time analysis. The organisers compress the whole list into one definition: Computing Systems Engineering involves techniques related to the safe, correct and deadline-compliant development of such systems.

Notice what that scope excludes as much as what it includes. SBESC is not a general computer-science conference: a paper on a new algorithm with no system, timing, resource or dependability dimension will struggle, however good it is. Conversely, work that might be squeezed out of neighbouring venues finds a natural home here — the energy cost of a cache policy for video encoding, a distributed algorithm for scheduling time-sensitive network links, smart-contract process management for the Industrial Internet of Things, model-driven generation of Android applications, retrofitting platforms that carry industrial equipment toward Industry 4.0, road-surface classification from inertial sensors. The common thread is always the engineered system: its deadlines, its faults, its watts, its proof. Authors framing a submission should make that thread explicit in the first page — which system, which constraint, which evidence that the constraint is met.

Publication details

How publication works: SBC, IEEE and the journal pathway

SBESC's publication model has three layers, and authors should understand all three before submitting. First, all accepted papers are published in the symposium's electronic proceedings and posted on the symposium website. Submission itself is exclusively through the Brazilian Computer Society's online submission service (JEMS), in PDF, following the IEEE template for conference publications. Second, full papers written in English and actually presented at the symposium are subsequently published by Conference Publishing Services and submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore, and thereby to the indexing services that draw on it. Presentation is a condition, not a courtesy: the calls state that accepted papers must be presented in order to be published in the proceedings, and that the Xplore step applies to papers effectively presented. Copyright follows the language of the paper — handled by SBC for papers in Portuguese and by IEEE for papers in English, in the editions whose calls spell this out. Third, the symposium operates a genuine journal pathway: papers with the highest review ranks have been invited to prepare extended versions for partner journals — the calls name the ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review for operating-systems papers and Springer's Journal on Design Automation for Embedded Systems for embedded-systems papers — and the 2013-era guidance already advised authors that, in some tracks, the best papers in English would be recommended to a specialised journal. An SBESC paper is therefore often the first, conference form of a work whose archival form appears later; cite the version you actually used.

Programme, people and the meeting itself

The symposium programme combines technical paper sessions with tutorials, invited talks and its co-located schools and competitions. The first edition's tutorials — mobile robotics and wireless sensor networks, both given by UFSC researchers — set the pattern of teaching alongside research, continued by the Embedded Systems School (ESSE) that shares registration with the symposium. Keynote speakers across editions map the field's international network: Rajesh Gupta and Björn Brandenburg in 2015; Eduardo Tovar, Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo and Rodolfo Azevedo in 2017; Marilyn Wolf, speaking on perception and computational efficiency for autonomous vehicles, at the twelfth edition in 2022. Best-paper awards are a fixture — the 2017 awards went to a distributed algorithm for scheduling TSCH links under an interference model, and to an exploration of cache-memory energy efficiency for HEVC motion estimation — and they are a useful shortcut for a newcomer who wants to see what this community rewards: a real system, a hard constraint, and convincing measurement or proof.

Editorial responsibility, in the journal sense of a standing editor-in-chief, does not exist here and is not publicly disclosed as such; each edition is run by its own general and programme chairs drawn from the community, under the symposium's continuing organisation. That is normal for a conference series and should not be read as a gap: the continuity is carried by the community, its host laboratory's archive, and the SBC/IEEE publication machinery rather than by a permanent editorial office. Researchers who need a current contact should use the current edition's page on the symposium website, not a directory listing.

Indexing, metrics and how to judge SBESC papers

Because English proceedings are submitted to IEEE Xplore, SBESC papers are discoverable through IEEE's own platform and the services that index IEEE conference content, and individual papers carry IEEE DOIs. The symposium has no Impact Factor, no SCImago journal ranking of its own as a journal, and no CiteScore as a journal title; conference-level citation counts that third-party aggregators compute for SBESC should be read as rough orientation only, and this profile does not quote them as official metrics. The honest quality signals are different: a competitive peer review by the relevant Brazilian and international programme committee; publication conditions that require presentation; the community's longevity since 2011; the calibre of its invited speakers; and its working journal pathway, which subjects the best work to a second, stricter review. In Brazilian computer-science evaluation culture, established SBC-community venues with IEEE proceedings are a recognised and respectable destination for systems work, particularly for groups whose research is experimental and artefact-driven.

Submission guidance

Write the paper the call asks for. Recent calls invite original research papers in English, Portuguese or Spanish — remembering that only English papers proceed to IEEE Xplore, an English version is the strategic choice for international visibility — formatted in the IEEE two-column template and within the edition's page limit, which has been six pages in several editions and up to eight in others, so check the current call rather than an old one. Submit only through SBC's submission system, in PDF, before the deadline in the call; the 2015 cycle, typical in shape, ran submission in late July, notification in early September, camera-ready in October and the symposium in November. In the paper itself, state the system and its constraints early, evaluate against the constraint that matters — deadline misses, energy, worst-case bounds, fault coverage — and compare with the strongest relevant baseline, because this programme committee will ask. If the work is among the best reviewed, be ready to extend it substantially for a partner journal rather than merely reformatting it. And plan to attend: an unpresented paper does not advance to the IEEE proceedings.

Frequently asked questions

Is SBESC a journal?

No. SBESC is an annual Brazilian symposium — the Brazilian Symposium on Computing Systems Engineering — whose papers appear in electronic proceedings, with English papers presented at the meeting published through IEEE Conference Publishing Services and submitted to IEEE Xplore.

What does SBESC stand for?

It is the acronym of the Portuguese name, Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Sistemas Computacionais. It grew out of the Operating Systems Workshop (WSO), the Embedded Systems Workshop (WSE) and the Real-Time Systems Workshop (WTR), and since 2013 has also incorporated the Brazilian Conference on Critical Embedded Systems (CBSEC).

Does SBESC have an ISSN, an Impact Factor or an APC?

No continuing ISSN for the series was identified in the official sources consulted; individual editions carry ISBNs and IEEE catalog numbers. As a symposium it has no Journal Impact Factor and no article processing charge; conference registration is a separate matter set by each edition.

In which languages can I submit?

Calls have accepted papers in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Only papers in English, and only those presented at the symposium, go forward to publication via CPS and submission to IEEE Xplore.

What topics does SBESC cover?

Operating, embedded, real-time and critical computing systems in the broad sense: scheduling and worst-case execution time, fault tolerance, formal verification, multiprocessor systems, IoT and sensor networks, energy-aware systems, run-time support and virtualisation, security, and applications in automotive, avionics and aerospace, among the other topics in its published list.

Can an SBESC paper become a journal article?

Yes, by invitation: the highest-ranked papers have been invited to prepare extended versions for partner journals named in the calls, including the ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review and Springer's Journal on Design Automation for Embedded Systems.

Profile prepared from the symposium's official website and calls for papers and IEEE proceedings records. Batch marker: DEPTH-BATCH228.

SBESC in the Brazilian research landscape

To an international reader, SBESC's significance is easiest to see from inside Brazil. Brazilian computer science organises much of its community life through the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) and its family of symposia, each anchoring a subfield; SBESC is that anchor for computing systems engineering, the subfield where Brazil has long-standing research strength, from the real-time and embedded groups at Florianópolis — the symposium's home laboratory, LISHA at UFSC, is itself a hardware–software integration lab — to operating-systems, networking and dependability groups across the country's federal universities. The symposium's mechanics reflect that ecology: submission through SBC's JEMS system, copyright split between SBC and IEEE by language, registration shared with the embedded-systems school and competition, and a deliberate co-location strategy that puts doctoral students, school participants and competition teams in the same building as the paper sessions. For a Brazilian systems researcher, SBESC is often the first national venue where a result is tested before an audience that truly understands it, and the English-language IEEE proceedings give the best of that work a permanent international record.

For readers outside Brazil, the practical consequences are threefold. First, when you find an SBESC paper in IEEE Xplore, you are reading work that survived review by the community that owns the topic in Brazil, presented in person — a stronger signal than an unpresented proceedings entry. Second, the Portuguese- and Spanish-language side of the symposium, published in the electronic proceedings but not forwarded to Xplore, is a reminder that the visible English record is a subset of the meeting; surveys of Latin American systems research that search only Xplore will undercount it. Third, the extended-version pathway means the literature often contains two forms of the same work — the SBESC paper and a later journal article in a venue such as the ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review or Springer's design-automation journal — and careful citation means choosing deliberately between them, crediting the conference for priority and the journal for the mature account. A symposium that has sustained that whole apparatus — merged communities, unified topics since 2015, IEEE publication, journal invitations, schools and competitions — since 2011 has earned the standing this profile records, without needing any invented metric to prove it.

Finally, a note for anyone maintaining a bibliography or a directory record for this title. Keep the symposium's name in its community form — Brazilian Symposium on Computing Systems Engineering, plural "Systems" — record Florianópolis 2011 as the first edition, SBC and IEEE Xplore as the publication pathway for English papers, and the founding workshops WSO, WSE and WTR, with CBSEC from 2013, as its origin. Those few accurate facts distinguish a trustworthy record from the templated approximations that directories otherwise generate for conference titles, and they are all an author or a reader needs in order to place an SBESC paper correctly in the literature of computing systems engineering, in Brazil and beyond it.