Call for Papers
ICFP 2007: International Conference on Functional Programming
Freiburg, Germany, 1-3 October 2007
ICFP 2007 seeks original papers on the art and science of functional
programming. Submissions are invited on all topics from principles to
practice, from foundations to features, from abstraction to
application.
The scope includes all languages that encourage functional programming,
including both purely applicative and imperative languages, as well as
languages with objects and concurrency. Particular topics of interest
include
* Applications and domain-specific languages: systems programming;
scientific and numerical computing; symbolic computing; artificial
intelligence; databases; graphical user interfaces; multimedia
programming; scripting; system administration; distributed-systems
and
web programming; XML processing; security
* Foundations: formal semantics; lambda calculus; type theory;
monads;
continuations; control; state; effects
* Design: algorithms and data structures; modules; type systems;
concurrency and distribution; components and composition; relations
to
object-oriented or logic programming
* Implementation: abstract machines; compile-time and run-time
optimization; just-in-time compilers; memory management; parallel
hardware; interfaces to foreign functions, services, components or
low-level machine resources
* Transformation and analysis: abstract interpretation; partial
evaluation; program transformation
* Software-development techniques: design patterns; specification;
verification; validation; debugging; test generation; tracing;
profiling
* Practice and experience: novel results drawn from experience in
education or industry
* Functional pearls: elegant, instructive examples of functional
programming
A functional pearl need not report original research results, but it
must
be instructive, elegant, and fun.
ICFP 2007 also seeks Experience Reports. An Experience Report is a
short
paper (2-4 pages) which need not present novel results, but which
should
provide evidence that functional programming really works or should
describe obstacles that prevented it from working. Detailed guidelines
appear below.
What's new this year?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Experienced ICFP authors may want to pay special attention to the
points
below, which are new this year.
* Double-blind review
* Author-date citations
* Supplemental material in a separate document,
not appended to the main text
* Morning deadline (but equivalent to late afternoon or early evening
in
many time zones of interest)
* Experience Reports
Instructions for authors
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By 11:00 AM Friday, 6 April 2007, Samoan time, submit an abstract of at
most 300 words and a full paper of at most 12 pages or an Experience
Report of at most 4 pages. Submissions will be accepted electronically,
at
a URL to be named later. The deadline is set at Samoan time, so if your
submission is in by 11:00 AM Friday according to your local time,
wherever
you are, the submission will be on time. The world clock at
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=4&day=6&year=2007&hour=11&min=0&sec=0&p1=282
can give you the equivalent in your local time, e.g., 3:00 PM Friday
in Portland, 6:00 PM Friday in Boston, and midnight Friday in Freiburg.
The deadline is firm.
Your submission should explain its contributions in both general and
technical terms, clearly identifying what has been accomplished,
explaining why it is significant, and comparing it with previous work.
Make the technical content understandable to a broad audience.
Each submission must adhere to SIGPLAN's republication policy, which
appears in full at http://www.acm.org/sigplan/republicationpolicy.htm.
The policy means in part that your paper may not have already appeared
in
a journal, conference, or workshop with published proceedings; that
you may not submit substantially the same work simultaneously to ICFP
and to another venue; and that your submission must discuss any
closely related material, including your own, that was previously
accepted at a journal, conference, or workshop with or without
published proceedings. Full details of the policy are available at the
SIGPLAN site. If you are in any doubt about whether this policy
applies to your paper, either consult the program chair in advance or
notify the chair when you submit. To do otherwise risks summary
rejection of your submission.
If your submission is accepted, you must assign copyright to ACM.
Proceedings will be published by the ACM Press.
Double-blind review
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To increase confidence in the fairness and objectivity of the reviewing
process, reviewing will be double blind. Make it possible for reviewers
to
evaluate your paper without having to know who you are. It should
suffice
to omit your names from your submission and to avoid revealing your
identity through citation; detailed guidelines are available at
http://icfp07.eecs.harvard.edu/blind.html.
Formatting
~~~~~~~~~~
Your submission must be printable on US Letter sized paper and be
either
PDF or PostScript that is interpretable by Ghostscript. If this
requirement is a hardship, make contact with the program chair at least
one week before the deadline.
Your submission must be at most 12 pages (4 pages for an Experience
Report), including bibliography and figures, in the standard ACM
conference format: two columns, nine-point font on a ten-point
baseline,
with pages 20pc (3.33in) wide and 54pc (9in) tall, with a column gutter
of
2pc (0.33in). (A suitable LaTeX class file is available from SIGPLAN;
see http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigplan/authorInformation.htm. Categories,
keywords, and so on are optional.) If you wish to supply material
beyond
the 12-page limit, up to and including a full technical report, you may
attach a separate document to your submission, on the understanding
that
reviewers are not expected to read it. (As a particular example, if you
feel that your submission should be supported by a lengthy technical
report, do not cite such a technical report on the web, since doing so
would reveal your identity. Please instead attach that report to your
submission.) Detailed instructions for attaching supplementary
documents
will be available on the submission web site.
The length limit is firm; submissions that do not meet these guidelines
will not be considered.
Citation
~~~~~~~~
We recommend (but do not require) that you put your citations into
author-date form. This procedure makes your paper easier to review. For
example, if you cite a result on testing as ``(Claessen and Hughes
2000)'', many reviewers will recognize the result instantly. On the
other
hand, if you cite it as ``[4]'', even the best-informed reviewer has to
page through your paper to find the reference. By using author-date
form,
you enable a knowledgeable reviewer to focus on content, not arbitrary
numbering of references. LaTeX users can simply use the natbib package
along with the plainnat bibliography style.
Author response
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You will have a 48-hour period (11:00 23 May to 11:00 25 May 2007 Samoa
time) to read and respond to reviews. Details of the author-response
process will be available as it approaches.
Special categories of papers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition to research papers, ICFP solicits two kinds of papers that
do
not require original research contributions: functional pearls, which
are
full papers, and Experience Reports, which are limited to four pages.
Authors submitting such papers may wish to consider the following
advice.
Functional pearls
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To paraphrase both Jon Bentley and Richard Bird, the ideal pearl goes
beyond solid engineering into the realm of insight and creativity. Just
as
a natural pearl grows from a grain of sand that has irritated an
oyster, a
topnotch functional pearl should grow from a real problem that has
irritated a programmer. A pearl should be polished, elegant,
instructive,
and entertaining. Ideally it should teach important programming
techniques
and fundamental design principles. Past pearls have included
instructive
examples of program calculation or proof, nifty presentations of old or
new data structures, and interesting applications and programming
techniques.
Papers submitted to ICFP as pearls often miss the mark, by being too
trivial, too complicated, or somehow not quite the elegant solution one
hopes for. The key to an accepted pearl is polishing. Your pearl is
likely
to be rejected if your readers get bored, if the material gets too
complicated, if too much specialized knowledge is needed, or if the
writing is distasteful.
Richard Bird advises:
* Throw away the rule book for writing research papers.
* Get in quick; get out quick.
* Be self-contained; don't go deep into related work, with lengthy
references.
* You are telling a story, so some element of surprise is welcome.
* Above all, be engaging.
* Give a talk on the pearl to non-specialists, your students, or your
department. If you changed the order of presentation for the talk,
consider using the new order in the next draft.
* Put the pearl away for a while, then take it out and polish it
again.
Experience reports
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ICFP has long solicited submissions on the practice and experience of
functional programming. But reports of experience are inherently
different
from research papers, and when judged by the criteria of scientific
merit,
novelty, or research contribution, they have not competed well against
traditional ICFP submissions. Yet we believe that the functional-
programming community would benefit from being able to draw on and cite
the experience of others. For this reason, we have introduced the ICFP
Experience Report.
Unlike a normal ICFP paper, the purpose of an Experience Report is not
to
add to the body of knowledge of the functional-programming community.
Rather, the purpose of an Experience Report is to help create a body of
published, refereed, citable *evidence* that functional programming
really
works---or to describe obstacles that prevented it from working.
An Experience Report is distinguished from a normal ICFP paper by its
title, by its length, and by the criteria used to evaluate it.
* Both in the proceedings and in any citations, the title of each
accepted Experience Report must begin with the words
"Experience Report", followed by a colon.
* Experience Reports are limited in length: the suggested length is
2 pages and the maximum length is 4 pages. Each accepted Experience
Report will be presented at the conference, but depending on the
number of Experience Reports and regular papers accepted, authors
of
Experience Reports may be asked to give shorter talks.
* Because the purpose of Experience Reports is to enable our
community
to accumulate a published, citable body of evidence about the
efficacy
of functional programming, an acceptable Experience Report need not
present novel results or conclusions. It is sufficient if the
Report
states a clear thesis and provides supporting evidence. The thesis
must be relevant to ICFP, but it need not be novel.
The program committee will accept or reject Experience Reports
based
on whether they judge the evidence to be convincing. Anecdotal
evidence will be acceptable provided it is well argued and the
author
explains what efforts were made to gather as much evidence as
possible. The committee will be especially convinced by evidence
that
includes *comparisons* of situations before and after the
introduction
or discontinuation of functional programming. Evidence drawn from a
single person's experience may be sufficient, but more weight will
be
given to evidence drawn from the experience of groups of people.
Possible topics for an Experience Report include, but are not limited
to
* Insights gained from real-world projects using functional
programming
* Comparison of functional programming with conventional programming
in
the context of an industrial project or a university curriculum
* Project-management, business, or legal issues encountered when
using
functional programming in a real-world project
* Curricular issues encountered when using functional programming in
education
* Real-world constraints that created special challenges for an
implementation of a functional language or for functional
programming
in general
An Experience Report should be short and to the point: if functional
programming worked for you in the same ways it has worked for others,
you
need only to summarize the results---the main part of your paper should
discuss how well it worked and in what context. Most readers will not
want
to know all the details of your project and its implementation, but
please
characterize your project and its context well enough so that readers
can
judge to what degree your experience is relevant to their own projects.
Be
especially careful to highlight any unusual aspects of your project.
Also
keep in mind that specifics about your project are more valuable than
generalities about functional programming; for example, it is more
valuable to say that your team delivered its software a month ahead of
schedule than it is to say that functional programming made your team
more
productive.
If your paper not only describes experience but also presents new
technical results, or if your experience refutes cherished beliefs of
the
functional-programming community, you may be better off submitting it
as a
full paper, which will be judged by the usual criteria of novelty,
originality, and relevance. If you unsure in which category to submit,
the
program chair will be happy to help you decide.
Other information
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Conference Chair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ralf Hinze (Universität Bonn)
Program Chair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Norman Ramsey
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, 02148 USA
Email: ······@eecs.harvard.edu
Phone: +1 617 496 8615
Mail sent to the address above is filtered for spam. If you send mail
and
do not receive a prompt response, particularly if the deadline is
looming,
feel free to telephone and reverse the charges.
Program Committee
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nick Benton (Microsoft Research)
Matthew Fluet (Toyota Technological Institute)
Jeremy Gibbons (University of Oxford)
Kevin Hammond (University of St Andrews)
Bastiaan Heeren (Utrecht University)
Graham Hutton (University of Nottingham)
Mark P. Jones (Portland State University)
Gabriele Keller (University of New South Wales)
Fabrice Le Fessant (INRIA/LIX, France)
Todd Millstein (UCLA)
Mike Sperber (DeinProgramm)
Christopher A. Stone (Harvey Mudd College)
Andrew Tolmach (Portland State University and INRIA Rocquencourt)
Janis Voigtländer (Technische Universität Dresden)
Stephanie Weirich (University of Pennsylvania)
Important Dates
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Submission: 11:00 6 April 2007, Samoa time (AST)
Author response: 11:00 23 May to 11:00 25 May 2007 (AST)
Notification: 8 June 2007
Final papers due: 20 July 2007
ICFP 2007 Web Site
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/~ralf/icfp07.html
Special Issue of JFP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Authors of the best final papers, as determined by the program
committee,
will be invited to submit journal versions for a special issue of the
Journal of Functional Programming.