[TYPES/announce] Off the Beaten Track 2016: Deadline extension and speaker funding opportunity

[Lindsey Kuper]

***Deadline extended to November 12 (AOE)***

# Call for Talk Proposals: Off the Beaten Track 2016

http://conf.researchr.org/track/POPL-2016/OBT-2016-talks

January 23, 2016

(co-located with POPL 2016, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA)

## Speaker funding opportunity

OBT is pleased to be able to provide financial assistance for speaker
expenses this year. If you have submitted or plan to submit a talk
proposal and you want to request funding for travel, workshop
registration, and accommodation while at the workshop, please complete
the funding application form linked from the workshop website above.

## Background

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. This
workshop’s goal is to identify and discuss problems that do not often
show up in our top conferences, but where programming language
research can make a substantial impact. We hope fora like this will
increase the diversity of problems that are studied by PL researchers
and thus increase our community’s impact on the world.

While many workshops associated with POPL have become more like
mini-conferences themselves, this is an anti-goal for OBT. The
workshop will be informal and structured to encourage discussion. We
are at least as interested in problems as in solutions.

## Scope

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.

Use your imagination. It's hard to imagine how a paper that discusses
programming languages could be considered out of scope. If in doubt,
ask the program chair.

## Prior OBTs

2016 marks the fifth year of OBT and of co-location with POPL. The
previous four workshops were:

  * OBT 2015, Mumbai, India
  * OBT 2014, San Diego, USA
  * OBT 2013, Rome, Italy
  * OBT 2012, Philadelphia, USA

## Important Dates

  * Thursday, 12 November 2015: Submission deadline
  * Tuesday, 1 December 2015: Author notification
  * Saturday, 23 January 2016: Workshop

## Submission

Please submit your talk proposal via EasyChair:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=obt2016

All submissions should be in PDF format, two pages or less, in at
least 10pt font, printable on US Letter paper. Authors are welcome to
include links to multimedia content such as YouTube videos or online
demos. Reviewers may or may not view linked documents; it is up to
authors to convince the reviewers to do so.

For each accepted submission, one of the authors will give a talk at
the workshop. The length of the talk will depend on the submissions
received and how the program committee decides to assemble the
program.

Reviewing of submissions will be very light. Authors should not expect
a detailed analysis of their submission by the program
committee. Accepted submissions will be posted as is on this web
site. By submitting a document, you agree that if it is accepted, it
may be posted and you agree that one of the co-authors will attend the
workshop and give a talk there. There will be no revision process and
no formal publication.

## Organizers

General chair:

  * Swarat Chaudhuri, Rice University

Program chair:

  * Lindsey Kuper, Intel Labs

Program committee:

  * Nada Amin, EPFL
  * Ken Eguro, Microsoft Research
  * Suresh Jagannathan, Purdue University
  * Limin Jia, Carnegie Mellon University
  * Yu David Liu, State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton
  * Emma Tosch, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  * Noam Zeilberger, MSR-Inria