[TYPES/announce] Higher-order, Typed, Inferred, Strict: ACM SIGPLAN ML Family Workshop

[Jacques Garrigue]

Higher-order, Typed, Inferred, Strict: ACM SIGPLAN ML Family Workshop
Thursday September 4, 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden
(immediately following ICFP and preceding OCaml Users and Developers Workshop)

Call For Papers         http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html

ML is a very large family of programming languages that includes Standard ML,
OCaml, F#, SML#, Manticore, MetaOCaml, JoCaml, Alice ML, Dependent ML, Flow
Caml, and many others. All ML languages, beside the great deal of syntax, share
several fundamental traits. They are all higher-order, strict, mostly pure, and
typed, with algebraic and other data types. Their type systems inherit from
Hindley-Milner. The development of these languages has inspired a significant
amount of computer science research and influenced a number of programming
languages, including Haskell, Scala and Clojure, as well as Rust, ATS and many
others.

ML workshops have been held in affiliation with ICFP continuously since 2005.
This workshop specifically aims to recognize the entire extended ML family and
to provide the forum to present and discuss common issues, both practical
(compilation techniques, implementations of concurrency and parallelism,
programming for the Web) and theoretical (fancy types, module systems,
metaprogramming). The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of the design,
semantics, theory, application, implementation, and teaching of the members of
the ML family. We also encourage presentations from related languages (such as
Scala, Rust, Nemerle, ATS, etc.), to exchange experience of further developing
ML ideas.

The ML family workshop will be held in close coordination with the OCaml Users
and Developers Workshop.

Format

Since 2010, the ML workshop has adopted an informal model. Presentations are
selected from submitted abstracts. There are no published proceedings, so any
contributions may be submitted for publication elsewhere. We hope that this
format encourages the presentation of exciting (if unpolished) research and
deliver a lively workshop atmosphere.

Each presentation should take 20-25 minutes, except demos, which should take
10-15 minutes. The exact time will be decided based on the number of accepted
submissions. The presentations will likely be recorded.

Post-conference proceedings

We are considering post-conference proceedings of selected papers. The Program
Committee shall invite interested authors of selected presentations to expand
their abstract for inclusion in the proceedings. The submissions are to be
reviewed according to the standards of the publication.

Coordination with the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop

The OCaml workshop is seen as more practical and is dedicated in significant
part to the OCaml community building and the evolution of the OCaml system. In
contrast, the ML family workshop is not focused on any language in particular,
is more research oriented, and deals with general issues of the ML-style
programming and type systems. Yet there is an overlap, which we are keen to
explore in various ways. The authors who feel their submission fits both
workshops are encouraged to mention it at submission time or contact the
Program Chairs.

Scope

We acknowledge the whole breadth of the ML family and aim to include languages
that are closely related (although not by blood), such as Rust, ATS, Scala,
Typed Clojure. Those languages have implemented and investigated run-time and
type system choices that may be worth considering for OCaml, F# and other ML
languages. We also hope that the exposure to the state of the art ML might
favorably influence those related languages. Specifically, we seek research
presentations on topics including but not limited to

 * Design: concurrency, distribution and mobility, programming for the web and
   embedded systems, handling semi-structured data, facilitating interactive
   programming, higher forms of polymorphism, generic programming, objects
 * Implementation: compilation techniques, interpreters, type checkers,
   partial evaluators, runtime systems, garbage collectors, etc.
 * Type systems: fancy types, inference, effects, overloading, modules,
   contracts, specifications and assertions, dynamic typing, error reporting,
   etc.
 * Applications: case studies, experience reports, pearls, etc.
 * Environments: libraries, tools, editors, debuggers, cross-language
   interoperability, functional data structures, etc.
 * Education: ML and ML-like languages in college or high-school, in general
   or computer science curriculum.

Four kinds of submissions will be accepted: Informed Positions, Research
Presentations, Experience Reports and Demos.

 * Informed Positions: A justified argument for or against a language feature.
   The argument must be substantiated, either theoretically (e.g., by a
   demonstration of (un)soundness, an inference algorithm, a complexity
   analysis), empirically or by a substantial experience. Personal experience
   is accepted as justification so long as it is extensive and illustrated
   with concrete examples.
 * Research Presentations: Research presentations should describe new ideas,
   experimental results, or significant advances in ML-related projects. We
   especially encourage presentations that describe work in progress, that
   outline a future research agenda, or that encourage lively discussion.
   These presentations should be structured in a way which can be, at least in
   part, of interest to (advanced) users.
 * Experience Reports: Users are invited to submit Experience Reports about
   their use of ML and related languages. These presentations do not need to
   contain original research but they should tell an interesting story to
   researchers or other advanced users, such as an innovative or unexpected
   use of advanced features or a description of the challenges they are facing
   or attempting to solve.
 * Demos: Live demonstrations or short tutorials should show new developments,
   interesting prototypes, or work in progress, in the form of tools,
   libraries, or applications built on or related to ML. (You will need to
   provide all the hardware and software required for your demo; the workshop
   organizers are only able to provide a projector.)


Important dates

Monday May 19 (any time zone):   Abstract submission
Monday June 30:                  Author notification
Thursday September 4, 2014:      ML Family Workshop

Submission

Submissions should be at most two pages, in PDF format, and printable on US
Letter or A4 sized paper. A submission should have a synopsis (2-3 lines) and a
body between 1 and 2 pages, in one- or two-column layout. The synopsis should
be suitable for inclusion in the workshop program.

Submissions must be uploaded to the workshop submission website before the
submission deadline (Monday May 19, 2014).
For any question concerning the scope of the workshop or the submission
process, please contact the program chair.


Program Committee

Kenichi Asai             Ochanomizu University, Japan
Matthew Fluet            Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Jacques Garrigue         Nagoya University, Japan
Dave Herman              Mozilla, USA
Stefan Holdermans        Vector Fabrics, Netherlands
Oleg Kiselyov (Chair)    Monterey, CA, USA
Keiko Nakata             Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Didier Re'my             INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France
Zhong Shao               Yale University, USA
Hongwei Xi               Boston University, USA