Brace yourselves. ESC Silicon Valley 2012 comes early next year. Time to brush up your abstracts and send them in.

I hate it when stores start “Back to school” in June. Or Halloween junk appears in September. Who wants to hurry the year along? Yet here I am, working on the conference sessions for the Embedded Systems Conference in Silicon Valley, March 26 – 29, 2012. And I need your help.

We start the Conference Call for Abstracts (CFA) well in advance to give our speakers time to prepare. We're initially widening the funnel this year to include a heckuva lot more technical content, and we have 32 track ideas, each of which can spawn up to five individual sessions. Of course, we'll whittle those down for the conference, where we can only include about 15 tracks, mapped to about 100 sessions and hands-on labs.

Why so many track ideas in September, six months before the conference? One reason is the conference is earlier this year than last year, and it takes time to plan a conference for everyone involved–speakers, exhibitors, and organizers. But the main reason is because there's a lot going on in embedded. And by the time 2012 rolls around, there will be even more that we couldn't have imagined. So we need to keep it broad for now. I mean, might HP actually toss WebOS out as FOSS like IBM did for Eclipse? If that happened, our track on “Linux & Open Source” might have some previously-unimaginable sessions.

And as Google absorbs Motorola Mobility (and their patents), will Google come out with another “gPhone” and make the embedded hardware open source? Then our notional tracks on hardware, multicore system design, low-power design, or Android might take on entirely different meanings.

As Apple launches iCloud and (likely) shows the world again how to make iPhones and Macbook Airs and AppleTVs work together seamlessly, how will this encourage the embedded M2M movement? We've seen how Apple's endorsement of OpenCL for GPGPUs is making nVidia's CUDA look Draconian. What if iCloud is opened up for the rest of us? The tracks “MCU-based Design in a Connected Environment” or “Connectivity, Security, & Networking” will surely spark some interesting session topics.

Anyway, back to the “call for action.”

If you have an interest in presenting a paper in an ESC session on any of the topics listed below, kindly click the Call for Abstract link here and sign up. As well, if you have any ideas or feedback on ESC or all things embedded, I'd like to hear from you. Here is the list of ESC tracks.

2012 ESC Silicon Valley tracks   1.   Academic & Education   2.   Android (includes Certification classes)   3.   Architecture Design   4.   Best Practices   5.   Challenges & Solutions in Embedded Design   6.   Connectivity, Security, & Networking   7.   Debugging & Optimizing   8.   Design & Test   9.   Designing for Software Quality 10.   Development Boards & Systems 11.   FPGAs in Embedded 12.   Hacking Embedded Systems 13.   Hardware 14.   High-Level Design Environments 15.   Legacy Code Migration 16.   Linux & Open Source 17.   Low-Power Design 18.   Managing & Process/Project Management 19.   MCU-based Design in a Connected Environment 20.   Microcontrollers & SoCs in embedded designs 21.   Modeling, Prototyping & Virtual Prototyping 22.   Multicore System Design 23.   New Directions in Software Processes & Tools 24.   Programming Languages & Techniques 25.   RTOS & Real Time 26.   Safety Designs & Reliability 27.   Security, Privacy, & Securing Embedded Systems 28.   Sensors, I/O, & Displays 29.   Static Code Analysis (includes Certification classes) 30.   Systems Architecture 31.   Top 10 Lessons Learned (from Disaster!) 32.   “Miscellaneous technical 33.   “Miscellaneous business and career”

Best,

—Chris A. Ciufo

Chris A. Ciufo is the director of content for Embedded Systems Design magazine, Embedded.com, and the Embedded Systems Conference. You may reach him at .