K-user mailing list

[Lindsey Kuper <icfp.publicity AT googlemail.com>]

                                  ICFP 2017
    The 22nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming
                             Oxford, United Kingdom
                           http://icfp17.sigplan.org/
                               Call for Papers

### Important dates

Submissions due:    Monday, February 27, Anywhere on Earth
                    https://icfp17.hotcrp.com
Author response:    Monday, April 17, 2017, 15:00 (UTC) -
                    Thursday, April 20, 2017, 15:00 (UTC)
Notification:       Monday, 1 May, 2017
Final copy due:     Monday, 5 June 2017
Early registration: TBA
Conference:         Monday, 4 September -
                    Wednesday, 6 September, 2017

### New this year

Those familiar with previous ICFP conferences should be aware of two 
significant changes that are being introduced in 2017:

1. Papers selected for ICFP 2017 will be published as the ICFP 2017 issue of 
a new journal, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL), 
which replaces the previous ICFP conference proceedings. The move to PACMPL 
will have two noticeable impacts on authors:

    * A new, two-phase selection and reviewing process that conforms to ACM’s 
journal reviewing guidelines.
   
    * A new, single-column format for submissions.

2. Authors of papers that are conditionally accepted in the first phase of 
the reviewing process will have the option to submit materials for Artifact 
Evaluation.

Further details on each of these changes are included in the following text.

### Scope

ICFP 2017 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, and 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, concurrency, or parallelism. Topics of interest 
include (but are not limited to):

  * *Language Design*: concurrency, parallelism, and distribution; modules; 
components and composition; metaprogramming; type systems; interoperability; 
domain-specific languages; and relations to imperative, object-oriented, or 
logic programming.

  * *Implementation*: abstract machines; virtual machines; interpretation; 
compilation; compile-time and run-time optimization; garbage collection and 
memory management; multi-threading; exploiting parallel hardware; interfaces 
to foreign functions, services, components, or low-level machine resources.

  * *Software-Development Techniques*: algorithms and data structures; design 
patterns; specification; verification; validation; proof assistants; 
debugging; testing; tracing; profiling.

  * *Foundations*: formal semantics; lambda calculus; rewriting; type theory; 
monads; continuations; control; state; effects; program verification; 
dependent types.

  * *Analysis and Transformation*: control-flow; data-flow; abstract 
interpretation; partial evaluation; program calculation.

  * *Applications*: symbolic computing; formal-methods tools; artificial 
intelligence; systems programming; distributed-systems and web programming; 
hardware design; databases; XML processing; scientific and numerical 
computing; graphical user interfaces; multimedia and 3D graphics programming; 
scripting; system administration; security.

  * *Education*: teaching introductory programming; parallel programming; 
mathematical proof; algebra.

Submissions will be evaluated according to their relevance, correctness, 
significance, originality, and clarity. Each 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. The technical content should be accessible to a broad 
audience.

ICFP 2017 also welcomes submissions in two separate categories — 
Functional Pearls and Experience Reports — that must be marked as such 
at the time of submission and that need not report original research results. 
 Detailed guidelines on both categories are given at the end of this call.

Please contact the program chair if you have questions or are concerned about 
the appropriateness of a topic.

### Preparation of submissions

**Deadline**: The deadline for submissions is Monday, February 27, 2017, 
Anywhere on Earth (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth>).  This 
deadline will be strictly enforced.

**Formatting**: (NOTE: NEW FORMAT REQUIREMENTS FOR ICFP 2017)  Submissions 
must be in PDF format, printable in black and white on US Letter sized paper, 
and interpretable by common PDF tools. All submissions must adhere to the 
"ACM Large" template that is available (in both LaTeX and Word formats) from 
<http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template>.  For authors using 
LaTeX, a lighter-weight package, including only the essential files, is 
available from <http://sigplan.org/Resources/Author/#acmart-format>.

There is a limit of 24 pages for a full paper or 12 pages for an Experience 
Report; in either case, the bibliography will not be counted against these 
limits. These page limits have been chosen to allow essentially the same 
amount of content with the new single-column format as was possible with the 
two-column format used in past ICFP conferences. Submissions that exceed the 
page limits or, for other reasons, do not meet the requirements for 
formatting, will be summarily rejected.

**Submission**: Submissions will be accepted at <https://icfp17.hotcrp.com/> 
(in preparation at the time of writing).

Improved versions of a paper may be submitted at any point before the 
submission deadline using the same web interface.

**Author Response Period**: Authors will have a 72-hour period, starting at 
15:00 UTC on Monday, April 17, 2017, to read reviews and respond to them.

**Supplementary Materials**: Authors have the option to attach supplementary 
material to a submission, on the understanding that reviewers may choose not 
to look at it. The material should be uploaded at submission time, as a 
single pdf or a tarball, not via a URL. This supplementary material may or 
may not be anonymized; if not anonymized, it will only be revealed to 
reviewers after they have submitted their review of the paper and learned the 
identity of the author(s).

**Authorship Policies**: All submissions are expected to comply with the ACM 
Policies for Authorship that are detailed at 
<https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/information-for-authors>.

**Republication Policies**: Each submission must adhere to SIGPLAN's 
republication policy, as explained on the web at 
<http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Policies/Republication>.

**Resubmitted Papers**: Authors who submit a revised version of a paper that 
has previously been rejected by another conference have the option to attach 
an annotated copy of the reviews of their previous submission(s), explaining 
how they have addressed these previous reviews in the present submission. If 
a reviewer identifies him/herself as a reviewer of this previous submission 
and wishes to see how his/her comments have been addressed, the program chair 
will communicate to this reviewer the annotated copy of his/her previous 
review. Otherwise, no reviewer will read the annotated copies of the previous 
reviews.

### Review Process

This section outlines the two-stage process with lightweight double-blind 
reviewing that will be used to select papers for presentation at ICFP 2017.  
We anticipate that there will be a need to clarify and expand on this 
process, and we will maintain a list of frequently asked questions and 
answers on the conference website to address common concerns.
 
**ICFP 2017 will employ a two-stage review process.**  The first stage in the 
review process will assess submitted papers using the criteria stated above 
and will allow for feedback and input on initial reviews through the author 
response period mentioned previously. At the PC meeting, a set of papers will 
be conditionally accepted and all other papers will be rejected.  Authors 
will be notified of these decisions on May 1, 2017.

Authors of conditionally accepted papers will be provided with committee 
reviews (just as in previous conferences) along with a set of mandatory 
revisions. After five weeks (June 5, 2017), the authors will provide a second 
submission. The second and final reviewing phase assesses whether the 
mandatory revisions have been adequately addressed by the authors and thereby 
determines the final accept/reject status of the paper. The intent and 
expectation is that the mandatory revisions can be addressed within five 
weeks and hence that conditionally accepted papers will in general be 
accepted in the second phase.

The second submission should clearly identify how the mandatory revisions 
were addressed. To that end, the second submission must be accompanied by a 
cover letter mapping each mandatory revision request to specific parts of the 
paper. The cover letter will facilitate a quick second review, allowing for 
confirmation of final acceptance within two weeks. Conversely, the absence of 
a cover letter will be grounds for the paper’s rejection.

This process is intended as a refinement of the review process that has been 
used in previous ICFP conferences. By incorporating a second stage, the 
process will conform to ACM’s journal reviewing guidelines for PACMPL.

**ICFP 2017 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing process.** To 
facilitate this, submitted papers must adhere to two rules:

  1. **author names and institutions must be omitted**, and
  2. **references to authors' own related work should be in the third 
person** (e.g., not "We build on our previous work ..." but rather "We build 
on the work of ...").

The purpose of this process is to help the PC and external reviewers come to 
an initial judgement about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible 
for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done 
in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of 
reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references 
should not be omitted or anonymized). In addition, authors should feel free 
to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally 
would. For instance, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web or 
give talks on their research ideas.

### Information for Authors of Accepted Papers

* As a condition of acceptance, final versions of all papers must adhere to 
the new ACM Large format. The page limits for final versions of papers will 
be increased to ensure that authors have space to respond to reviewer 
comments and mandatory revisions.

* Authors of accepted submissions will be required to agree to one of the 
three ACM licensing options: copyright transfer to ACM; retaining copyright 
but granting ACM exclusive publication rights; or open access on payment of a 
fee.  Further information about ACM author rights is available from 
<http://authors.acm.org>.

* At least one author of each accepted submissions will be expected to attend 
and present their paper at the conference.  The schedule for presentations 
will be determined and shared with authors after the full program has been 
selected.  Presentations will be videotaped and released online if the 
presenter consents.

* We intend that the proceedings will be freely available for download from 
the ACM Digital Library in perpetuity via the OpenTOC mechanism.

* ACM Author-Izer is a unique service that enables ACM authors to generate 
and post links on either their home page or institutional repository for 
visitors to download the definitive version of their articles from the ACM 
Digital Library at no charge. Downloads through Author-Izer links are 
captured in official ACM statistics, improving the accuracy of usage and 
impact measurements. Consistently linking to the definitive version of an ACM 
article should reduce user confusion over article versioning. After an 
article has been published and assigned to the appropriate ACM Author Profile 
pages, authors should visit 
<http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service> to learn how to 
create links for free downloads from the ACM DL.

* The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made 
available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to *two weeks 
prior* to the first day of the conference. The official publication date 
affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

### Artifact Evaluation

Authors of papers that are conditionally accepted in the first phase of the 
review process will be encouraged (but not required) to submit supporting 
materials for Artifact Evaluation. These items will then be reviewed by a 
committee, separate from the program committee, whose task is to assess how 
the artifacts support the work described in the associated paper. Papers that 
go through the Artifact Evaluation process successfully will receive a seal 
of approval printed on the papers themselves. Authors of accepted papers will 
be encouraged to make the supporting materials publicly available upon 
publication of the proceedings, for example, by including them as "source 
materials" in the ACM Digital Library.  An additional seal will mark papers 
whose artifacts are made available, as outlined in the ACM guidelines for 
artifact badging.

Participation in Artifact Evaluation is voluntary and will not influence the 
final decision regarding paper acceptance.

Further information about the motivations and expectations for Artifact 
Evaluation can be found at 
<http://icfp17.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2017-Artifacts>.

### 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 half the length of a 
full paper. Authors submitting such papers should consider the following 
guidelines.

#### Functional Pearls

A Functional Pearl is an elegant essay about something related to functional 
programming. Examples include, but are not limited to:

  * a new and thought-provoking way of looking at an old idea

  * an instructive example of program calculation or proof

  * a nifty presentation of an old or new data structure

  * an interesting application of functional programming techniques

  * a novel use or exposition of functional programming in the classroom

While pearls often demonstrate an idea through the development of a short 
program, there is no requirement or expectation that they do so. Thus, they 
encompass the notions of theoretical and educational pearls.

Functional Pearls are valued as highly and judged as rigorously as ordinary 
papers, but using somewhat different criteria. In particular, a pearl is not 
required to report original research, but, it should be concise, instructive, 
and entertaining. A pearl is likely to be rejected if its readers get bored, 
if the material gets too complicated, if too much specialized knowledge is 
needed, or if the writing is inelegant. The key to writing a good pearl is 
polishing.

A submission that is intended to be treated as a pearl must be marked as such 
on the submission web page, and should contain the words "Functional Pearl" 
somewhere in its title or subtitle. These steps will alert reviewers to use 
the appropriate evaluation criteria. Pearls will be combined with ordinary 
papers, however, for the purpose of computing the conference's acceptance 
rate.

#### Experience Reports

The purpose of an Experience Report is to help create a body of published, 
refereed, citable evidence that functional programming really works &mdash; 
or to describe what obstacles prevent it from working.

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 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. The acceptance rate for Experience Reports will be computed and 
reported separately from the rate for ordinary papers.
  
  * Experience Report submissions can be at most 12 pages long, excluding 
bibliography.

  * 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 body of evidence about the efficacy of functional programming, 
an acceptable Experience Report need not add to the body of knowledge of the 
functional-programming community by presenting 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. Typically, more convincing 
evidence is obtained from papers which show how functional programming was 
used than from papers which only say that functional programming was used. 
The most convincing evidence often 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.

An Experience Report should be short and to the point: it should make a claim 
about how well functional programming worked on a particular project and why, 
and produce evidence to substantiate this claim. If functional programming 
worked in this case in the same ways it has worked for others, the paper need 
only summarize the results &mdash; the main part of the paper should discuss 
how well it worked and in what context. Most readers will not want to know 
all the details of the project and its implementation, but the paper should 
characterize the project and its context well enough so that readers can 
judge to what degree this experience is relevant to their own projects. The 
paper should take care to highlight any unusual aspects of the project. 
Specifics about the project are more valuable than generalities about 
functional programming; for example, it is more valuable to say that the team 
delivered its software a month ahead of schedule than it is to say that 
functional programming made the team more productive.

If the paper not only describes experience but also presents new technical 
results, or if the experience refutes cherished beliefs of the 
functional-programming community, it may be better off submitted it as a full 
paper, which will be judged by the usual criteria of novelty, originality, 
and relevance. The program chair will be happy to advise on any concerns 
about which category to submit to.

### Organizers

General Chair: Jeremy Gibbons (University of Oxford, UK)
Program Chair: Mark Jones (Portland State University, USA)

Artifact Evaluation Chair: Ryan R. Newton (Indiana University, USA)
Industrial Relations Chair: Ryan Trinkle (Obsidian Systems LLC, USA)
Programming Contest Organiser: Sam Lindley (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Publicity and Web Chair: Lindsey Kuper (Intel Labs, USA)
Student Research Competition Chair: Ilya Sergey (University College London, 
UK)
Video Chair: Jose Calderon (Galois, Inc., USA)
Workshops Co-Chair: Andres Löh (Well-Typed LLP)
Workshops Co-Chair: David Christiansen (Indiana University, USA)

Program Committee:

Bob Atkey (University of Strathclyde, Scotland)
Adam Chlipala (MIT, USA)
Dominique Devriese (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Martin Erwig (Oregon State, USA)
Matthew Flatt (University of Utah, USA)
Ronald Garcia (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Kathryn Gray (University of Cambridge, England)
John Hughes (Chalmers University and Quvik, Sweden)
Chung-Kil Hur (Seoul National University, Korea)
Graham Hutton (University of Nottingham, England)
Alan Jeffrey (Mozilla Research, USA)
Ranjit Jhala (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Shin-ya Katsumata (Kyoto University, Japan)
Lindsey Kuper (Intel Labs, USA)
Dan Licata (Wesleyan University, USA)
Ben Lippmeier (Digital Asset, Australia)
Gabriel Scherer (Northeastern University, USA)
Alexandra Silva (University College London, England)
Nikhil Swamy (Microsoft Research, USA)
Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Indiana University, USA)
Nicolas Wu (University of Bristol, England)
Beta Ziliani (CONICET and FAMAF, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina)