Call for talk proposals: OBT 2017

It’s time once again to sound the call for talk proposals for the Off the Beaten Track workshop, the next edition of which will be co-located with POPL 2017 in Paris next January!

2017 will be my third year of having something to do with organizing OBT, and I’m proud to be serving as general chair this year, alongside program chair Bob Atkey and a fantastic program committee.

Bob has already written a blog post that has all the important details about how and when to submit talk proposals to OBT, so I’ll simply add a couple of points about why you should submit talk proposals. First of all, experts agree that OBT is Obviously the Best Track at POPL. Second, going to Paris for POPL and OBT may be more affordable than you think:

• If you’re a student, you can apply for a PLMW scholarship that will pay your airfare, hotel, and registration fees for PLMW and POPL. (OBT is held on the day right after POPL, so you can stick around for an extra day to catch OBT.) PLMW, the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, is targeted mostly at newer PL grad students and senior undergraduates, but even not-so-new grad students will get something out of going — I did. You still have a few days to apply for PLMW scholarships; don’t wait!
• If you’re not a student, but you are a member of SIGPLAN (which costs $25 USD to join), you can apply for a SIGPLAN Professional Activities Committee grant to attend POPL, to cover the cost of child care during the conference, or to cover the cost of travel for a companion if you need one. There’s also travel funding available specifically for those traveling from locations outside of North America or Europe. Scroll down past the “Student Members” section on this page and check out the sections titled “Professional Members”, “Child-care Travel Support”, “Companion Travel Grant”, and “Long Distance International Travel”. These PAC grants for professional SIGPLAN members are underpublicized — until recently, I thought PAC grants were only for students, but that’s not the case!

To me, an OBT workshop consisting only of talks from people who’d be attending POPL anyway would not be very OBT at all, and so I’m hoping that the PLMW and PAC funding opportunities help us bring some qualified speakers to OBT who would have found it difficult or impossible to attend otherwise.