OCaml Workshop 2024 at ICFP -- announcement and call for proposals

[pitag]

Hello everyone

This year, ICFP (the International Conference on Functional Programming) is going to take place in beautiful Milan.

Such as every year since 2012, on the last day of that conference, i.e. on September 7th (Saturday), we’ll hold a workshop on OCaml. The workshop is intended to cover all different kinds of aspects of the OCaml programming language as well as the OCaml ecosystem and its community, such as scientific and/or research-oriented, engineering and/or user-oriented, as well as social and/or community-oriented.

Call for talk proposals

The call for talk proposals for the workshop is open.

Dates

Here are the important dates:

• Talk proposal submission deadline: May 30th (Thursday)
• Author notification: July 4th (Thursday)
• Workshop: September 7th (Saturday)

Submissions

Submissions are typically around 2 pages long (flexible), describing the motivations of the work and what the presentation would be about.

We encourage everyone who might be interested in giving a talk to submit a proposal! We truly mean everyone, and also have strongly anyone in mind who belongs to a group that’s traditionally underrepresented at OCaml workshops, e.g. due to your gender(s) or non-gender, where you’re from or based or whatever other kinds of characteristics you might have. You should all be able to find all information you’ll need to submit a proposal on the official call for talk proposals. However, if you have any question, don’t hesitate to ask us.

Quota on accepted talks per affiliation

Even though none of us is a fan of quotas, last year’s workshop experimented with a quota of a maximum of four talks given by speakers with the same company/university/institute affiliation. In order to guarantee a coverage of a diverse range of topics and perspectives, we’ll experiment with the same affiliation quota again.

Do not hesitate to submit your talk proposal in any case: quotas, if needed, will be taken into account by the PC after reviewing all submissions, so there’s no reason to self-select upfront.

About the workshop itself

So far, we’ve only talked about talk proposals and formalities. The really exciting part will be the workshop itself! It’s going to be a whole-day workshop and, similarly to previous years, it’s likely going to have four sessions of about four talks each. It’s a rather informal and interactive environment, where people engage in all kinds of conversations about OCaml during the breaks and after the workshop.

Hybrid attendance and cost for speakers

We’re aiming to make the workshop hybrid with the same streaming modalities as last year, meaning that talks as well as participation can be either in-person or remote, and remote attendance will be free. To promote a good atmosphere, communication and engagement, we prefer to have most talks in-person, but remote talks will be most welcome as well.

We know that giving the talk in-person comes with an economic cost. We’re very happy to announce that thanks to the OCaml Software Foundation, registration fees will be covered for speakers in case they can’t get them funded by other means (e.g. their employer).

We will do our best to provide the best workshop experience possible for remote participants, within the constraints of the hybrid format. While attending in-person does come with advantages, it also comes with an environmental cost, and we strongly support transitioning to a less plane-intensive organization for conferences and community events .

Related events

The day before the OCaml workshop, i.e. Sep 6th (Friday), is the day of the ML workshop, with focus on more theoretical aspects of OCaml and the whole family of ML languages in general. The ML workshop has already been announced on the OCaml discuss and tends to be very interesting for OCaml lovers as well.

We’re looking forward to the the talk submissions and to the workshop!
Let us know if you have any questions.
@Armael and @pitag

[Armael]

A small reminder that there is one month left until the submission deadline for the OCaml Workshop colocated with ICFP’24!

We are looking forward to all kind of submissions, be it research-, user- or community-oriented, and the submission format is quite flexible, so don’t hesitate to send us your work!

Your OCaml workshop organizers, @pitag and @Armael

[pitag]

As mentioned above, the submission deadline for the OCaml Workshop at ICFP is getting closer.

As a new note: A few weeks after the OCaml Workshop at ICFP, there’ll be the new initiative Fun OCaml in Berlin. It’s super exciting to have three OCaml-related workshops (first the ML Workshop and the OCaml Workshop at ICFP, and then Fun OCaml) over the course of a few weeks, and we’re also very much looking forward to Fun OCaml!

We’ve already mentioned that when reading the submissions, as every year, we’ll collaborate closely with the organizers of the ML workshop at ICFP, which intersects with the OCaml Workshop on talks with a strong theoretical and research-oriented focus. We’ll also collaborate with the organizers of Fun OCaml this year, which might intersect on talks with a strong practical focus. With collaboration, we mainly mean potentially transferring submissions from one workshop to another after checking in with the authors (side-note: if you want your presentation to be taken into account for a potential transfer, you need to respect the earlier of the two submission deadlines).

Best, and looking forward to this exciting year of OCaml workshops,
@Armael and @pitag

[pitag]

One more update, this time about hybrid modalities: We now have the confirmation from sigplan (the organizers behind ICFP) that we’ll have the same hybrid modalities as last year So in particular, speakers can give talks remotely via a Zoom call. We’ll also make sure this time that the remote speaker can see the audience over the call. To promote a good atmosphere, communication and engagement, we do prefer to have most talks in-person, but remote talks will be most welcome as well. So, don’t hesitate to submit a talk even if you can’t make it in person.

Cheers,
@Armaël and @pitag

PD: Once the time comes closer, we’ll give detail on youtube live and discord links for remote attendance as well

[gadmm]

Thanks, this update about hybridity should also be true for the ML workshop.

[pitag]

To be as transparent as possible with the organization of the 2024 OCaml Workshop, here’s an update:

We’ve received 20 submissions that all look very nice and that cover a pretty wide range of OCaml-topics. We’re very happy with those submissions, have started the review process, and are looking forward to interesting and exciting talks. Thanks a lot to all authors!

Cheers,
@Armael and @pitag

[UnixJunkie]

Am I too late to propose a talk?

That would be a remote presentation unfortunately.

[pitag]

Yes, unfortunately, it’s too late to submit a talk now: After the submission deadline one week ago, the program committee members have already expressed their preferences for which submission to review, we’ve assigned submissions to reviewers and the review process has already started.

If I understand correctly, @UnixJunkie, you’d have proposed to present parany, parallel OCaml programs, and their performance, right? That would have been a very good fit for the OCaml Workshop! To propose two potential alternative workshops whose calls for presentations are still open:

What about the ML Workshop at ICFP? Just like the OCaml Workshop, that workshop will also be hybrid, so you could give your talk remotely. @gadmm , do you think the topic would fit in well into the ML Workshop, or would you prefer a stronger focus on theoretical foundations?

The other option would be Fun OCaml. Your topic would fit in very well there as well. However, as far as I understand, Fun OCaml will be in-person only, so it wouldn’t be an option to give the talk remotely. @sabine, @davesnx , let us know if that’s not correct (or if you’d like to add anything :)).

[gadmm]

Replying in private.

[UnixJunkie]

Ok, I’m definitely too late then, I’ll try next time.

[pitag]

Hello everyone

The accepted talks for the OCaml Workshop are now public! You can find them on the Workshop website.

For those who haven’t seen it yet: The registration for the workshops and the whole conference is open now. There’s currently an early bird discount, which ends on August 3rd.

We’re very happy with the expected quality and diversity of talks of the OCaml Workshop. To give a bit of a taste via a few examples of talks that will be presented:

• In the context of the OCaml language, On the design and implementation of Modular Explicits will present a major and long-wanted new language feature whose PR on the compiler landed last week.
• In the context of the OCaml ecosystem, Opam 2.2 and beyond will present technical details as well as struggles about the just-landed 2.2 release of your package manager.
• In the context of day-to-day OCaml applications, B · o · B, a universal & secure file-transfer software in OCaml will present a real-life MirageOs application.
• In the context of OCaml developer experience, Project-wide occurrences for OCaml, a progress report will present a shiny new editor feature that makes OCaml code navigation a joy.
• There will also be four talks in the landscapes of OCaml multi-core (i.e. OCaml 5).

We’ve given the authors a few weeks to update their abstracts and papers if they want to. At the beginning of August, the scheduled program with updated abstracts and attached papers will be on the website.

As we’ve mentioned already, the in-person experience of the workshop is a very nice one, allowing everyone to interact with colleagues and the rest of the community, to chat about the talks and OCaml in general, hit up the speakers etc. However, if you’re not able to make it, you’ll still be able to enjoy the talks: The talks will be live-streamed, and some time later be made permanently available online.

Really, genuinely, thanks a lot to all members of the Program Committee for the very valuable reviews and interactions as well as to all the authors of all submissions!

Cheers,
@Armael and @pitag