Call for Papers

The second ACM conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT’20) will present the latest developments in technologies related to novel financial infrastructure such as cryptocurrencies and their applications, blockchains, and exchanges.

Papers may present advances in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, verification, or empirical evaluation and measurement of relevant systems.

Schedule

• Submission deadline: June 11 2020
• Author notification: Aug 6 2020
• Conference: 21-23 October 2020

Scope

• Blockchains and blockchain technologies
• Consensus protocols
• Permissioned blockchains
• High-performance transaction processing
• Centralized and decentralized exchanges
• Threat models and attacks
• Cryptoassests
• Client and network security
• Security analysis of operational systems
• Custody solutions
• Anonymity and privacy
• Metrics, measurements, and network forensics
• Proof-of-work, -stake, -burn, and alternatives
• Smart contracts and applications
• Smart contract security: formal analysis, correct by design, security frameworks
• Scalability issues and solutions
• User studies
• Technical repercussions of economic, legal, ethical, regulatory, and societal aspects
• Transaction graph analysis
• Financial markets
• Relationship to traditional payment systems
• Fraud detection and financial crime prevention
• Case studies (e.g., of adoption, attacks, forks, scams, etc.)
• Applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Censorship resistance
• Quantum-resistant cryptography, quantum algorithms and quantum cryptography in financial technologies
• Hardware to aid financial technologies

SoK

We accept Systemization of Knowledge papers. These are not surveys of prior academic work but rather organization of results presented informally by the open-source community or used in operational projects. SoK submissions should be clearly marked with an “SoK:” prefix in their title. 

Instructions for Paper Submission

All submissions must be original work; the submitter must clearly document any overlap with previously published or simultaneously submitted papers from any of the authors. Failure to point out and explain overlap will be grounds for rejection. Simultaneous submission of the same paper to another venue with proceedings or a journal is not allowed and will be grounds for automatic rejection.

Anonymous Submission

Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and papers should avoid revealing their identity in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Publication as a technical report or in an online repository does not constitute a violation of this policy.  Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review.

Conflict of Interest

During submission of a research paper, the submission site will request information about conflicts of interest of the paper’s authors with program committee (PC) members. It is the full responsibility of all authors of a paper to identify all and only their potential conflict-of-interest PC members, according to the following definition. A paper author has a conflict of interest with a PC member when one or more of the following conditions holds

• The PC member is a co-author of the paper.
• The PC member has been a co-worker in the same company or university within the past two years.
  • For student interns, the student is conflicted with their supervisors and with members of the same research group. If the student no longer works for the organization, then they are not conflicted with a PC member from the larger organization.
• The PC member has been a collaborator within the past two years.
• The PC member is or was the author’s primary thesis advisor, no matter how long ago.
• The author is or was the PC member’s primary thesis advisor, no matter how long ago.
• The PC member is a relative or close personal friend of the author.

For any other situation where the authors feel they have a conflict with a PC member, they must explain the nature of the conflict to the PC chairs, who will mark the conflict if appropriate. Papers with incorrect or incomplete conflict of interest information as of the submission closing time are subject to immediate rejection.

Ethical Considerations

Submissions that describe experiments on human subjects, that analyze data derived from human subjects (even anonymized data), or that otherwise may put humans at risk or affect financial situation of humans in existing systems:

• Disclose whether the research received an approval or waiver from each of the authors’ institutional ethics review boards (IRB) if applicable.
• Discuss steps taken to ensure that participants and others who might have been affected by an experiment were treated ethically and with respect.

If the submission deals with vulnerabilities (e.g., software vulnerabilities in a given program or design weaknesses in a hardware system), the authors need to discuss in detail the steps they have taken or plan to take to address these vulnerabilities (e.g., by disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors). The same applies if the submission deals with personal identifiable information (PII) or other kinds of sensitive data. If a paper raises significant ethical and legal concerns, it might be rejected based on these concerns.

Page Limit and Formatting

Submitted papers may include up to 12 pages of text in double-column ACM format (see https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template), and unlimited pages for references and appendices. Latex submissions should use sigconf template.

All submissions will be automatically checked for conformance to these requirements. Failure to adhere to the page limit and formatting requirements are grounds for immediate rejection. 

A total of 13 pages is allowed for camera-ready papers. Appendices will be read at the reviewers’ discretion.

Submission

Submissions must be in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Authors should pay special attention to unusual fonts, images, and figures that might create problems for reviewers. Your document should render correctly in Adobe Reader 9 and when printed in black and white. 

Conference Submission Server

https://aft20.hotcrp.com/

Publication and Presentation

Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate publication clearances. One of the authors of the accepted paper is expected to present the paper during the conference, although we are happy to accommodate remote presentations. 

Program Committee

Steering Committee

• Ittai Abraham, VMware research
• Dan Boneh, Stanford University
• Christian Cachin, University of Bern
• Ittay Eyal, Technion
• Maurice Herlihy, Brown University
• Satoshi Nakamoto (pending confirmation)
• Maureen O’Hara, Cornell University
• Tim Roughgarden, Columbia University
• Eli Ben Sasson, Technion
• Emin Gun Sirer, Cornell University

For comments and questions please email chairs@aft.acm.org