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ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications:
Software for Humanity (SPLASH'16)
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Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Sun 30th October - Fri 4th November , 2016
Keynotes: Benjamin Pierce and Andy Ko
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN
Combined Call for Contributions to Collocated Events:
- SPLASH-E, Student Research Competition, Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop
- Workshops: AGERE, DSLDI, DSM, FOSD, ITSLE, LWC@SLE, META, MOBILE!, NOOL, PLATEAU, Parsing@SLE, REBLS, SA-MDE, SEPS, VMIL, WODA
The ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) embraces all aspects of software construction, to make it the premier conference at the intersection of programming, languages, systems, and software engineering. SPLASH'16 hosts a record number collocated tracks and events, from associated conferences (GPCE, SLE) and symposia (DLS, Scala), to 16 workshops! Please see below about important dates. We look forward to your submissions!
SPLASH'16 Tracks
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## SPLASH-E: Foundational Concepts of Computation
SPLASH-E will be a one-day working meeting, with the following goals:
- Building on prior work, identify and enumerate the foundational concepts of computation.
- More ambitiously, for each concept, create a detailed plan for a lesson (or short sequence of lessons) for 8 year olds, to teach the concept.
We do not solicit publications, but we ask prospective participants to submit a one-paragraph position statement.
## Student Research Competition
Continuing the successes of previous years, SPLASH is again hosting an ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition (ACM SRC). The competition is an internationally-recognized venue that enables undergraduate and graduate students to experience the research world and to share their research results with other students and SPLASH attendees. The competition has separate categories for undergraduate and graduate students and awards prizes to the top three students in each category. The ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition shares the Poster session’s goal to facilitate interaction with researchers and industry practitioners, providing both sides with the opportunity to learn of ongoing, current research. Additionally, the Student Research Competition gives students experience with both formal presentations and evaluations.
Submission deadline: Mon 15 Aug 2016
## PLMW: Programming Language Mentoring Workshop
The purpose of Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) is to give promising students who consider pursuing a graduate degree in this field an overview of what research in this field looks like and how to get into and succeed in graduate school. In other words, a combination whirlwind tour of this research area, networking opportunity, and how-to-succeed guide. The program of PLMW will include talks by prominent researchers of the field of programming languages and software engineering providing an insight in their research. To learn more about PLMW, please see the SIGPLAN PLMW web page (
http://www.sigplan.org/Conferences/PLMW/).
Application deadline: Sun 14 Aug 2016
Workshops
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SPLASH'16 will host a record number of 16 workshops:
## AGERE! Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control
The AGERE! workshop is aimed at focusing on programming systems, languages and applications based on actors, active/concurrent objects, agents and – more generally – high-level programming paradigms promoting a mindset of decentralized control in solving problems and developing software. The workshop is designed to cover both the theory and the practice of design and programming, bringing together researchers working on models, languages and technologies, and practitioners developing real-world systems and applications.
Abstract submission deadline: Mon 8 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
Paper submission deadline: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## DSLDI: Domain-specific Language Design and Implementation
Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI) is a workshop intended to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in discussing how DSLs should be designed, implemented, supported by tools, and applied in realistic contexts. The focus of the workshop is on all aspects of this process, from soliciting domain knowledge from experts, through the design and implementation of the language, to evaluating whether and how a DSL is successful. More generally, we are interested in continuing to build a community that can drive forward the development of modern DSLs.
Submission deadline talk proposals: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## DSM: Domain-Specific Modeling
Domain-specific languages provide a viable and time-tested solution for continuing to raise the level of abstraction, and thus productivity, beyond coding, making systems development faster and easier. When accompanied with suitable automated modeling tools and generators it delivers to the promises of continuous delivery and devops. In domain-specific modeling (DSM) the models are constructed using concepts that represent things in the application domain, not concepts of a given programming language. The modeling language follows the domain abstractions and semantics, allowing developers to perceive them- selves as working directly with domain concepts. Together with frameworks and platforms, DSM can automate a large portion of software production.
Submission deadline: Mon 15 Aug 2016
## FOSD: Feature-oriented Software Development
Feature orientation is an emerging paradigm of software development. It supports the automatic generation of large-scale software systems from a set of units of functionality, called features. The key idea of feature-oriented software development (FOSD) is to explicitly represent similarities and differences of a family of software systems for a given application domain (e.g., database systems, banking software, text processing systems) with the goal of reusing software artifacts among the family members.
Submission deadline: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## ITSLE: Industry Track Software Language Engineering
Industry Track for Software Language Engineering (ITSLE) is a workshop to bring together practitioners and researchers from industry and academia working on the area of software language engineering. Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) techniques are being developed and used broadly in industry. However, as the size and complexity of software systems steadily increase, so does the cost of maintaining and improving the DSL and MDSE techniques and tools. It introduces new challenges such as language co-evolution, maintainability of legacy software using older version of DSLs and MDSE techniques, and extendability and scalability of these techniques. Some of these challenges have been addressed by the SLE research community and some remain unsolved.
Submission deadline: Mon 8 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## LWC@SLE: Language Workbench Challenge
Language workbenches are tools for software language engineering. They distinguish themselves from traditional compiler tools by providing integrated development environment (IDE) support for defining, implementing, testing and maintaining languages. Not only that, languages built with a language workbench are supported by IDE features as well (e.g., syntax highlighting, outlining, reference resolving, completion etc.). As a result, language workbenches achieve a next level in terms of productivity and interactive editor support for building languages, in comparison to traditional batch-oriented, compiler construction tools. The goal of this workshop is twofold. First: exercise and assess the state-of-the-art in language workbenches using challenge problems from the user perspective (i.e. the language designer). Second: foster knowledge exchange and opportunities for collaboration between language workbench implementors and researchers.
Submission deadline of solutions: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## META
The Meta’16 workshop aims to bring together researchers working on metaprogramming and reflection, as well as users building applications, language extensions such as contracts, or software tools. With the changing hardware and software landscape, and increased heterogeneity of systems, metaprogramming becomes an important research topic to handle the associate complexity once more. Contributions to the workshop are welcome on a wide range of topics related to design, implementation, and application of metaprogramming techniques, as well as empirical studies on and typing for such systems and languages.
Abstract submission: Mon 8 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
Paper submission: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## Mobile!
Mobile application use and development is experiencing enormous growth, and by 2016 more than 200 billion apps have been downloaded. The mobile domain presents new challenges to software engineering. Mobile platforms are rapidly changing, with diverse capabilities including various input modes, wireless communication types, on-device memory and disk capacities, and sensors. Applications function on wide ranges of platforms, requiring scaling according to hardware. Many applications interact with third-party services, requiring application development with effective security and authorization processes for those dataflows. “Bring your own device” policies pose security challenges including employer and employee data privacy. Developing secure mobile applications requires new tools and practices such as improved refactoring tools for hybrid applications; polyglot applications; and testing techniques for multiple devices. This workshop aims to establish a community of researchers and practitioners, leading to further research in mobile development.
Paper submission deadline: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## NOOL: New Object-Oriented Languages
NOOL-16 is a new unsponsored workshop to bring together users and implementors of new(ish) object oriented systems. Through presentations, and panel discussions, as well as demonstrations, and video and audiotapes, NOOL-16 will provide a forum for sharing experience and knowledge among experts and novices alike. We invite technical papers, case studies, and surveys in the following areas, related to theory of object oriented programming, new languages, implementation of languages, tools and environment, applications and related work.
Abstract submission deadline: Thu 1 Sep 2016
## PLATEAU: Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools
Programming languages exist to enable programmers to develop software effectively. But how efficiently programmers can write software depends on the usability of the languages and tools that they develop with. The aim of this workshop is to discuss methods, metrics and techniques for evaluating the usability of languages and language tools. The supposed benefits of such languages and tools cover a large space, including making programs easier to read, write, and maintain; allowing programmers to write more flexible and powerful programs; and restricting programs to make them more safe and secure. PLATEAU gathers the intersection of researchers in the programming language, programming tool, and human-computer interaction communities to share their research and discuss the future of evaluation and usability of programming languages and tools.
Paper submission deadline: Thu 11 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## Parsing@SLE
Parsing@SLE 2016 is the fourth annual workshop on parsing programming languages. The intended participants are the authors of parser generation tools and parsers for programming languages and other software languages. For the purpose of this workshop “parsing” is a computation that takes a sequence of characters as input and produces a syntax tree or graph as output. This possibly includes tokenization using regular expressions, deriving trees using context-free grammars, and mapping to abstract syntax trees. The goal is to bring together today’s experts in the field of parsing, in order to explore open questions and possibly forge new collaborations. The topics may include algorithms, implementation and generation techniques, syntax and semantics of meta formalisms (BNF), etc. We expect to attract participants that have been or are developing theory, techniques and tools in the broad area of parsing.
Abstract submission deadline: Fri 9 Sep 2016
## REBLS: Reactive and Event-based Languages & Systems
Reactive programming and event-based programming are two closely related programming styles that are becoming ever more important with the advent of advanced HPC technology and the ever increasing requirement for our applications to run on the web or on collaborating mobile devices. A number of publications on middleware and language design — so-called reactive and event-based languages and systems (REBLS) — have already seen the light, but the field still raises several questions. For example, the interaction with mainstream language concepts is poorly understood, implementation technology is in its infancy and modularity mechanisms are almost totally lacking. Moreover, large applications are still to be developed and patterns and tools for developing reactive applications is an area that is vastly unexplored.
Paper submission deadline: Thu 11 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## SA-MDE: Tutorial on MDD with Model Catalogue and Semantic Booster
With the model-driven development (MDD) approach to software, rather than building each system from scratch, one specifies a metamodel covering a whole class of similar systems, provides a universal generator to transform metamodel instances into executable programs, and specifies each system by a higher-level model conforming to the metamodel. When the application domain concerns semantically rich datasets—with structured entities, interlinked data, and sophisticated integrity constraints—then the MDD tools should support this richness: in the metamodel, in individual system models, and in the generation process. In this tutorial, we present the Model Catalogue and Semantic Booster, tools respectively for curating and exploiting semantically rich data in a MDD workflow, which are under development as part of ALIGNED. Participants will learn what the tools can do, gain hands-on experience with using them, and be able to contribute challenges and suggestions for future development.
## SEPS: Software Engineering for Parallel Systems
This workshop provides a stable forum for researchers and practitioners dealing with compelling challenges of the software development life cycle on modern parallel platforms. The increased complexity of parallel applications on modern parallel platforms (e.g. multicore/manycore, distributed or hybrid) requires more insight into development processes, and necessitates the use of advanced methods and techniques supporting developers in creating parallel applications or parallelizing and re-engineering sequential legacy applications. We aim to advance the state of the art in different phases of parallel software development, covering software engineering aspects such as requirements engineering and software specification; design and implementation; program analysis, profiling and tuning; testing and debugging.
Paper submission deadline: Mon 15 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## VMIL: Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages
The VMIL workshop is a forum for research in virtual machines and intermediate languages. It is dedicated to identifying programming mechanisms and constructs that are currently realized as code transformations or implemented in libraries but should rather be supported at VM level. Candidates for such mechanisms and constructs include modularity mechanisms (aspects, context-dependent layers), concurrency (threads and locking, actors, capsules, processes, software transactional memory), transactions, development tools (profilers, runtime verification), etc. Topics of interest include the investigation of which such mechanisms are worthwhile candidates for integration with the run-time environment, how said mechanisms can be elegantly (and reusably) expressed at the intermediate language level (e.g., in bytecode), how their implementations can be optimized, and how virtual machine architectures might be shaped to facilitate such implementation efforts.
Paper submission deadline: Mon 8 Aug 2016 (EXTENDED)
## WODA: Workshop on Dynamic Analysis
The International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA) is the place where researchers interested in dynamic analysis and related topics can meet and discuss current research, issues, and trends in the field. WODA exists since 2003 and has been co-located with several different SE/PL conferences in the past, including ICSE, ISSTA, ASPLOS, and SPLASH. See
https://sites.google.com/site/scwoda/ for the history of WODA. The 2016 edition of WODA will be a mix of invited talks by high-visibility researchers in the community and presentations of submitted workshop papers.
Submission deadline: Fri 19 Aug 2016
# SPLASH Supporters
SPLASH'16 is kindly supported by the following organizations: