[ecoop-info] SPLASH'12 Workshops: Call for Papers and Participation

[Ulrik Pagh Schultz]

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CALL FOR WORKSHOPS PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION
(deadlines throughout August, see individual calls)

SPLASH'12 WORKSHOPS are part of

ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications:
Software for Humanity (SPLASH'12)
Tucson, Arizona
October 19-26, 2012
http://www.splashcon.org
http://twitter.com/splashcon
http://www.facebook.com/SPLASHCon
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN
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SPLASH'12 Workshops will address a rich variety of well-known and
new emerging research areas, and will provide you a creative and
collaborative environment, to discuss and solve challenging problems,
with attendees from industry and research organizations around the
world.

To take advantage of this opportunity please consider to contribute to
the workshops that best fit your interests by submitting your research
work, experiences, or position papers.

In addition to the regular workshops, this year we are running a
number of "Wavefront workshops" designed to bring together researchers
and practitioners for hands-on workshops relevant to industrial
practitioners and academics interested in learning new and interesting
yet well-proven techniques.

All deadlines are in August, but vary from workshop to workshop, as
can be seen below.  Many workshops will have their proceedings
published in ACM Digital Library.  In general, please visit the
splashcon.org website and each workshop's website to find up-to-date
information.

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WORKSHOP PROGRAM - REGULAR

The SPLASH'12 workshops program is listed below and the abstracts at
the end, however, the full program and additional information will
evolve and will be posted online at SPLASH'12 website.
http://splashcon.org

AGERE! - 2nd Int. Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and
Decentralized Control
organized by Gul Agha, Rafael Bordini, Assaf Marron and Alessandro Ricci
Submissions deadline: August 5 (abstract), August 12 (paper), 2012
http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it

DCP - Developing Competency in Parallelism: Techniques for Education
and Training
organized by Richard A. Brown and Edward F. Gehringer
Submissions deadline: August 24, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/SPLASH-2012-DCP

DSM - 12th Domain-Specific Modeling Workshop
organized by Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Jonathan Sprinkle, Matti Rossi and
Jeff Gray
Submissions deadline: August 10, 2012
URL: http://www.dsmforum.org/events/DSM12/

FOOL - 19th International Workshop on Foundations of
Object-Oriented Languages
organized by John Boyland, Jeremy Siek, and Jonathan Aldrich
Submissions deadline: August 5 (abstract), August 12 (paper), 2012
http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~boyland/fool2012

FREECO - 3rd Workshop on Free Composition
organized by Christoph Bockisch, Lodewijk Bergmans, Ian Piumarta, and
Steven te Brinke
Submissions deadline: August 17, 2012
URL: http://trese.ewi.utwente.nl/workshops/FREECO/FREECO-SPLASH2012/

PLATEAU - Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming
Languages and Tools
organized by Shane Markstrum, Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Caitlin
Sadowski
Submissions deadline: August 10, 2012
https://sites.google.com/site/workshopplateau/

RACES - SPLASH 2012 Workshop on Relaxing Synchronization for Multicore
and Manycore Scalability
organized by Andrew P. Black, Theo D'Hondt, Doug Kimelman, Martin
Rinard and David Ungar
Submissions deadline: August 6, 2012
http://soft.vub.ac.be/races/

VMIL'12 - 6th Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages
organized by Hridesh Rajan, Christoph Bockisch, Michael Haupt, and
Steve Blackburn
Submissions deadline: August 17, 2012
http://design.cs.iastate.edu/vmil/

xDD - What Drives Design?
organized by Dennis Mancl, Steven D. Fraser, Gail E. Harris, and Bill
Opdyke
Submissions deadline: August 27, 2012
http://mysite.verizon.net/dennis.mancl/splash12

WORKSHOP PROGRAM - WAVEFRONT

DCI - Data-Context-Interaction Paradigm Workshop
organized by James O. Coplien
http://splash.cleanarchitecture.com

Neo4j: A Programmatic Introduction to Neo4j
organized by James Webber
http://www.neotechnology.com/splashcon2012/

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For additional information, clarification, early feedback, or answers
to questions, please contact the Workshop Organizers of your favorite
workshops, or the Workshops Chairs, Ademar Aguiar and Ulrik Pagh
Schultz, at workshops at splashcon.org


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ANNEX: WORKSHOP ABSTRACTS AND DATES

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AGERE! - 2nd Int. Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and
Decentralized Control
organized by Gul Agha, Rafael Bordini, Assaf Marron and Alessandro Ricci
(Sunday 21st and Monday 22nd of October)

The fundamental turn of software into concurrency and distribution is
not only a matter of performance, but also of design and
abstraction. It calls for programming paradigms that, compared to
current mainstream paradigms, would allow us to more naturally think
about, design, develop, execute, debug, and profile systems exhibiting
different degrees of concurrency, autonomy, decentralization of
control, and physical distribution.

The AGERE! workshop is dedicated on programming systems, languages and
applications based on actors, agents and any related programming
paradigm promoting a decentralized-control mindset in solving problems
and in developing systems to implement such solutions.

The workshop is designed to cover both the theory and the practice of
design and programming, bringing together researchers and
practitioners working on programming models, languages, technologies,
as well as real-world systems and applications.

Submissions deadline: August 5 (abstract), August 12 (paper), 2012

URL: http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it

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DCI - Data-Context-Interaction Paradigm Workshop
organized by James O. Coplien (Monday, 22nd October)

This is a Wavefront workshop that provides a foundation for exploring
and applying the DCI (Data, Context and Interaction) paradigm. DCI is
a means to supporting full object orientation that restores much of
the original object vision that has been lost as the industry has
adopted classes rather than objects as its primary design and
programming artefacts, and extends the original vision from a more
data-centric structure to focus more on the business value of
system-level operations. The tutorial will teach roles and contexts as
fundamental new building blocks of object-oriented programs. DCI is a
paradigm that more faithfully lives up to the original goals of the
object paradigm in its basis in stakeholder mental models, its
proximity to end user concerns, and its dynamic computational model,
than one finds in class-oriented programming.

URL: http://splash.cleanarchitecture.com

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DCP - Developing Competency in Parallelism: Techniques for Education
and Training
organized by Richard A. Brown and Edward F. Gehringer (Monday, 22nd of
October)

With the increasing penetration of parallelism into computing,
programmers of all stripes need to acquire competencies in parallel
programming. This workshop will concentrate on discussing and
disseminating resources for gently introducing parallelism into
programmers' skill sets.  The expected audience is academic faculty
and industrial trainers.

The program will include multiple refereed paper sessions, as well as
a separate hands-on session (contributed by organizers) presenting an
example body of materials for teaching and training in parallel
programming, and an "unconference" session, for which you may submit
topics for discussion by filling out a form (for details, see the
workshop web page).

We are seeking paper submissions along the following lines:
- Training materials from developers and vendors of programming
  languages.
- Short "killer" parallel application examples that can be used in
  academic or training environments.
- Short modules that can be used in short courses for practicing
  programmers, or dropped into academic courses dealing with some
  aspect of programming.
- Tools for visualizing or teaching parallelism in programming. (A
  tools submission should include expository illustrations,
  screenshots, and/or accompanying video(s) that portray the
  functionality and value of that tool for pedagogy and training; test
  access to a tool is optional.)
We especially seek papers related to
- GPU, or hybrid (GPU+CPU) programming, or
- productive parallel-programming frameworks scuh as Hadoop/MapReduce.

Submissions deadline: August 24, 2012

URL: http://tinyurl.com/SPLASH-2012-DCP

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DSM - 12th Domain-Specific Modeling Workshop
organized by Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Jonathan Sprinkle, Matti Rossi and
Jeff Gray (Monday, 22nd October)

Domain-specific modeling (DSM) provides a modern solution to demands
for higher productivity by constricting the gap between problem and
solution modeling. In the past, productivity gains have been sought
through new programming languages. Today, domain-specific modeling
languages provide a viable solution for continuing to raise the level
of abstraction beyond coding, making development faster and easier.

In 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 themselves as working
directly with domain concepts. Together with frameworks and platforms,
DSM can automate a large portion of software production.

Some possible topics for submission to the workshop include:
* Industry/academic experience reports
* Creation of metamodel-based languages
* Empirical studies or assessments that suggest best practices for
  language design
* Novel approaches for code generation from domain-specific models
* Evolution of languages
* Metamodeling frameworks and languages
* Tools for supporting DSMs

Submissions deadline: August 10, 2012

URL: http://www.dsmforum.org/events/DSM12/

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FOOL - 19th International Workshop on Foundations of Object-Oriented
Languages
organized by John Boyland, Jeremy Siek, and Jonathan Aldrich (Monday
October 22nd, 2012)

The search for sound principles for object-oriented languages has given
rise to much work during the past two decades, leading to a better
understanding of the key concepts of object-oriented languages and to
important developments in type theory, semantics, program verification,
and program development.

Submissions for this event are invited in the general area of
foundations of object-oriented languages. Topics of interest include
language semantics, type systems, memory models, program verification,
formal calculi, concurrent and distributed languages, database
languages, and language-based security issues.

Submissions deadline: August 5 (abstract), August 12 (paper), 2012

URL: http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~boyland/fool2012

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FREECO - 3rd Workshop on Free Composition
organized by Christoph Bockisch, Lodewijk Bergmans, Ian Piumarta, and
Steven te Brinke (Monday, 22nd October)

The history of programming languages shows a continuous search for new
composition mechanisms, which are better suited for structuring
increasingly complex software systems into modules that can be
developed and reused independently. Well-known examples are procedure
calls, object aggregation, function composition, inheritance,
delegation, mix-ins, aspects, and so forth. Composition mechanisms can
address various forms of composition of objects or components at the
level of their behavior or interactions, e.g., by design patterns,
contracts or explicit protocols. They can be general-purpose, but
there is also a wide variety of domain-specific compositions, which
are applicable for certain categories of applications.

However, most languages adopt a very small and fixed set of
composition mechanisms, usually with explicit notation and predefined
semantics. If a language does not provide any mechanisms with the
required compositional behavior, programmers need to write workarounds
in the application program, which typically have a negative impact on
the quality of the software. Alternatively, they may introduce the new
composition mechanisms through macros, libraries, frameworks or
language extensions, which also negatively affects the application if
it is not well-integrated with the application program.

This workshop intends to stimulate research in program-ming languages
and software development by exploring the notion that languages should
not offer a limited set of fixed composition mechanisms, but allow for
flexibility, a wide variety of compositions, domain-specific and
tailored compositions, or programmable compositions of various program
artifacts.

Submissions deadline: August 17, 2012

URL: http://trese.ewi.utwente.nl/workshops/FREECO/FREECO-SPLASH2012/

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Neo4j: A Programmatic Introduction to Neo4j
organized by James Webber (Sunday, October 21st)

This is a Wavefront workshop on using Neo4j, a popular graph
database. Graph databases like Neo4j are an esoteric but powerful
member of the NOSQL family. For highly connected data, graph databases
can be thousands of times faster than relational databases, making
them popular for managing complex data across many commercial and
research domains from finance to biology, and network management to
geospatial.

Using graphs, researchers benefit from the expressive model and
centuries of discrete mathematics underlying graph databases and so
they can be a powerful ally for scientific problem solving. To that
end, this Wavefront workshop will introduce Neo4j, a popular
transactional graph database that is widely in use in research and
commerce. The workshop's aims are twofold: to remind attendees of the
beneficial affordances provided by thinking and graphs, and to get
attendees familiar enough with Neo4j such that they can use it to
solve problems in their everyday research efforts. There will
therefore be a mixture of theory and accompanying practical sessions
to demonstrate the capabilities of graph data and the Neo4j
database. Specifically attendees will learn about:

- NoSQL and Graph Database overview to set the scene for contemporary
  data models and to place graphs in context.
- Neo4j Fundamentals and Architecture to show how the notion of
  mechanical sympathy enables extremely fast queries that can be
  several orders of magnitude greater than some relational systems.
- The Neo4j Core API and Indexing to build graphs and name interesting
  starting point for graph queries.
- Neo4j Traverser APIs to traverse graphs to discover interesting
  information goals.
- Declarative querying with Cypher to show how allow non-programming
  specialists can still harness Neo4j for productive use with a humane
  and expressive query language.

Each session is a mixture of a small amount of theory combined with a
set of practical exercises. The practical parts of the workshop
consist of Koan-style lessons where a specific aspect of the Neo4j
stack is presented as a set of failing unit tests which participants
will work to fix, gradually becoming more challenging until the
attendees are capable of implementing sophisticated graph operations
against Neo4j. Attendees won't need any previous experience with Neo4j
or NOSQL databases, but will require some fluency in Java, a little
familiarity with a modern IDE, and a basic understanding of JUnit to
help complete the lab tasks.

URL: http://www.neotechnology.com/splashcon2012/

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PLATEAU - Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming
Languages and Tools
organized by Shane Markstrum, Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Caitlin
Sadowski (Sunday, October 21st)

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. We are also interested
in the input of other members of the programming research community
working on related areas, such as aspects, refactoring, design
patterns, program analysis, program comprehension, software
visualization, end-user programming, and other programming language
paradigms. Some particular areas of interest are:

- empirical studies of programming languages
- methodologies and philosophies behind language and tool evaluation
- software design metrics and their relations to the underlying
  language
- user studies of language features and software engineering tools
- visual techniques for understanding programming languages
- critical comparisons of programming paradigms
- tools to support evaluating programming languages
- psychology of programming

Submissions deadline: August 10, 2012

URL: https://sites.google.com/site/workshopplateau/

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RACES - SPLASH 2012 Workshop on Relaxing Synchronization for Multicore
and Manycore Scalability
organized by Andrew P. Black, Theo D'Hondt, Doug Kimelman, Martin
Rinard and David Ungar (Sunday, 21st October)

Massively-parallel systems are coming: core counts keep rising --
whether conventional cores as in multicore and manycore systems, or
specialized cores as in GPUs. Conventional wisdom has been to utilize
this parallelism by reducing synchronization to the minimum required
to preserve determinism -- in particular, by eliminating data
races. However, Amdahl's law implies that on highly-parallel systems
even a small amount of synchronization introduces serialization that
limits scaling. Thus, the conventional wisdom is doomed to fail as it
hits "the CAS ceiling". We are forced to confront the trade-off
between synchronization and the ability of an implementation to scale
performance with the number of processors: synchronization inherently
limits parallelism.

A new school of thought is arising: one that accepts and even embraces
nondeterminism (including data races), and is in return able to
dramatically reduce synchronization, or even eliminate it completely.
However, this approach requires that we leave the realm of the certain
and enter the realm of the merely probable. How can we cast aside the
certainty of truth, the security of correctness, the logic of a proof,
and adopt a new way of thinking, where answers are good enough but not
certain, and where many processors work together in parallel without
quite knowing the states that the others are in? We may need some
amount of synchronization, but how much? Or better yet, how little?
What mental tools and linguistic devices can we give programmers to
help them adapt to this challenge? This workshop focuses on these
questions and related ones--harnessing parallelism by limiting
synchronization, even to the point where programs will compute
inconsistent or approximate rather than exact answers.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers who, in the quest for
scalability, have been exploring the limits of how much
synchronization can be avoided. We will consider the workshop
successful if the attendees come away with new insights into
fundamental principles, and new ideas for algorithms, data structures,
programming languages, and mental models. The goal of this workshop is
both to influence current programming practice and to initiate the
coalescence of a new research community giving rise to a new subfield
within the general area of concurrent and parallel
programming. Results generated by the workshop will be made persistent
via a workshop website and possibly via the ACM Digital Library.

Submission date: Monday, August 6, 2012

URL: http://soft.vub.ac.be/races/

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VMIL'12 - 6th Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages
organized by Hridesh Rajan, Christoph Bockisch, Michael Haupt, and
Steve Blackburn (Sunday, 21st October)

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 the VM level. Candidates for such mechanisms and
constructs include modularity mechanisms (aspects, context-dependent
layers), concurrency (threads and locking, actors, software
transactional memory), transactions, 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.

Submissions deadline: August 17, 2012

URL: http://design.cs.iastate.edu/vmil/

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xDD - What Drives Design?

organized by Dennis Mancl, Steven D. Fraser, Gail E. Harris, and Bill
Opdyke (Sunday, 21st October)

Designers are busy people, and they are getting busier. In today's
world designers must deal with three competing pressures: rapid
changes in end-user technologies and applications domains, marketplace
demands for innovation in products and services, and a steady stream
of improvements in implementation technologies.

There have been a number of attempts to drive design from
responsibilities, features, tests, models, behavior, domains, and
contracts.  If we follow one or more of design approaches, will we
make things better?  Do any of these approaches (RDD, FDD, TDD, and so
on) offer any help to the busy designer?

This workshop is a forum to discuss the design principles that are
most effective.  The workshop will help methodologists and academics
to get some feedback on how their new design ideas are received by
everyday practitioners, and it will be a place for industry
practitioners to share experiences about what design practices work.

Submissions deadline: August 27, 2012

URL: http://mysite.verizon.net/dennis.mancl/splash12

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--
Ulrik Pagh Schultz, associate professor, University of Southern Denmark
ups at mmmi.sdu.dk, http://www.mmmi.sdu.dk/~ups, +4565503570