[Haskell-cafe] Haskell hackers send an idea to the "off the beaten track" workshop at POPL

[David Walker]

Haskell is an amazing language for implementing Domain-Specific Languages.  If you have an idea about a new domain-specific language you'd like to implement, a new problem that needs to be solved or any other new and unusual idea concerning programming language research, submit it to OBT: "Off the Beaten Track:  Under-represented Problems for Programming Language Researchers."  This is a new, informal, lively workshop associated with POPL in Philadelphia, Saturday January 28.  It is easy to submit something, just write up a 1-page or 2-page PDF on your idea and submit it here:  

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/obt/

We are eager to have lots of 5-minute talks as well as longer talks interleaved with discussion.  Don't be shy:  submit your off-the-beaten-track problems and ideas.  The deadline is Nov 14.  See the web site or below for more info

Thanks,

David Walker
Program Chair

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Dates:
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Paper submission 	Monday November 14, 2011 (11:59PM US EST)
Author notification 	Friday December 9, 2011
Conference 	        Saturday January 28, 2012

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Scope:
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Programming language researchers have the principles, tools, algorithms and abstractions to solve all kinds of problems, in all areas of computer science. However, identifying and evaluating new problems, particularly those that lie outside the typical core PL problems we all know and love, can be a significant challenge. Hence, the goal of this workshop is to identify and discuss problems that do not often show up in our top conferences, but where programming language researchers can make a substantial impact. The hope is that by holding such a forum and associating it directly with a top conference like POPL, we can slowly start to increase the diversity of problems that are studied by PL researchers and that by doing so we will increase the impact that our community has on the world.

While many workshops associated with POPL have become more like mini-conferences themselves, this is not the goal for Off the Beaten Track. The workshop will be informal and structured to encourage discussion. It will also be centered around problems and problem areas as opposed to fully-formed solutions.

A good submission is one that outlines a new problem or an interesting, underrepresented problem domain. Good submissions may also remind the PL community of problems that were once in vogue but have not recently been seen in top PL conferences. Good submissions do not need to propose complete or even partial solutions, though there should be some reason to believe that programming languages researchers have the tools necessary to search for solutions in the area at hand. Submissions that seem likely to stimulate discussion about the direction of programming language research are encouraged. Possible topics include any of the following.

    Biology, chemistry, or other natural sciences
    Art, music, graphics and animation
    Networking, cloud computing, systems programming
    Linguistics
    Economics, law, politics or other social sciences
    Web programming, social computing
    Algorithms and complexity
    Mathematics, statistics
    Machine learning or artificial intelligence
    Education
    Unusual compilers; underrepresented programming languages
    Surprise us

We certainly hope to see submissions on topics not mentioned above. The goal of the workshop is to be inclusive, not exclusive. Submissions are evaluated on the basis of creativity, novelty, clarity, possible impact and potential for stimulating discussion.

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Submission Details
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See the web site:  http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/obt/

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Program Committee
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Program Chair:

David Walker (Princeton University)

Program Committee:

Thomas Ball (Microsoft Research, Redmond)
Trevor Jim (AT&T)
Julia Lawall (DIKU)
Boon Thau Loo (University of Pennsylvania)
Geoff Mainland (Microsoft Research, Cambridge)
Chung-chieh Shan (Cornell)