Call for submissions: Off the Beaten Track 2016

It’s that time again. The call for talk submissions for Off the Beaten Track 2016 is open, and this year I have the honor of serving as the program chair!

In case it’s not obvious, this is my first time serving as a program chair for anything. I’m grateful to Nada Amin, Ken Eguro, Suresh Jagannathan, Limin Jia, Yu David Liu, Emma Tosch, and Noam Zeilberger for agreeing to be on the program committee, and I’m very excited about the workshop we’ll be able to put on.

2016 will mark the fifth year of OBT and of its co-location with POPL. The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of research that involves novel programming language techniques and applications, but that doesn’t often appear in mainstream PL conferences. As David Walker noted when organizing the first OBT: “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.”

As always, OBT is a talks-only workshop, and a talk proposal is two pages at most. Submission is through EasyChair. If you’re thinking about submitting a talk — and I hope that you are! — I recommend perusing the successful talk proposals from the past four OBTs to get an idea of (some of) the possibilities. You can find them on the workshop websites from 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.

If you have any questions or are wondering whether your idea is in scope for OBT, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks, and I hope we’ll see you at OBT!