[TYPES/announce] Workshop on probabilistic programming semantics

[Shan, Chung-chieh]

Workshop on probabilistic programming semantics (PPS 2016)
Colocated with POPL 2016 (St Petersburg, Florida, United States)

http://conf.researchr.org/track/POPL-2016/pps-2016

Call for extended abstracts

Probabilistic programming is the idea of expressing probabilistic models
and inference methods as programs and transformations, to ease use and
reuse.  The recent rise of practical implementations as well as research
activity in probabilistic programming has renewed the need for semantics to
help us share insights and innovations.

This workshop aims to bring programming-language and machine-learning
researchers together to advance the semantic foundations of probabilistic
programming.  Topics include but are not limited to:

  * the denotational semantics of probabilistic functions, open universe,
    loops, and conditioning;
  * the operational semantics of sampling, exact inference, and MCMC
    transitions;
  * axiomatic and equational reasoning;
  * types and polymorphism;
  * and last but not least, how semantics informs any aspect of
    probabilistic programming, be it design, theory, implementation, or
    applications.

We expect this workshop to be informal, and our goal is to foster
collaboration and establish common ground.  Thus, the proceedings will not
be a formal or archival publication, and we expect to spend only a portion
of the workshop day on traditional research talks.  Nevertheless, as a
concrete basis for fruitful discussions, we call for extended abstracts
describing specific and ideally ongoing work on probabilistic programming
semantics.

Extended abstracts are up to 2 pages in PDF format.  Please submit them by
October 16 using EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pps2016

Friday, October 16, 2015: Submissions due
Friday, November 6, 2015: Author notification
Friday, December 11, 2015: Final papers due
Saturday, January 23, 2016: Workshop, colocated with POPL

Program committee:

  * Chung-chieh Shan, Indiana University (chair)
  * Kathleen Fisher, Tufts University (chair)
  * Cameron Freer, MIT
  * Chung-Kil Hur, Seoul National University
  * Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA
  * Stuart Russell, University of California, Berkeley
  * Chad Scherrer, Galois, Inc.
  * Mitchell Wand, Northeastern University
  * Frank Wood, University of Oxford