The Reserve Reviewer Policy
The Reserve Reviewer Policy is an experimental policy to help conferences scale to increased workloads. We outline its design and first implementation.
Box Plots, or Better! 5 Reasons Why Box Plots are the Better Default Choice for Visualizing Performance
When we start moving our programming language ideas from the world of proofs to the world of practical implementations, we start to encounter many different problems, one of which is performance. While the most important performance improvement is to go from a...
Hybrid SPLASH 2021 Retrospective
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many conferences were held online starting in late March 2020, and several of us helped with the fully virtual offering of SPLASH 2020. By mid-2021, however, vaccination was widespread and effective at preventing COVID infection and severe disease, and it became feasible to consider in-person attendance at conferences. Polls of authors and the larger community indicated strong interest in holding an in-person version of SPLASH. Still, as of October 2021 the US had not relaxed its travel restrictions on people from large parts of the world, and even beyond that some people would not be able to travel to SPLASH. We therefore decided to offer SPLASH as a Hybrid conference in October 2021, offering both in-person and virtual attendance options. We were also excited about piloting a hybrid conference, because there are many longer-term benefits if we can run them well, including supporting both in-person networking and accessibility for attendees who can only attend remotely. We knew doing so would be hard, but we also hoped to learn valuable lessons. SPLASH 2021 turned out to be an interesting case study as the first major post-COVID PL conference to go hybrid, and one of the earliest across the ACM as well.
Improving gender balance in academia, a computer scientist’s suggestion of where to start (part 2 of 2)
We all need to step up and start working to improve gender equality in computer science and engineering. This is the second of two blog posts about this fascinating and frustrating problem, in which I provide three suggestions for how to get started.
Improving gender balance in academia: a computer scientist’s suggestion of where to start (part 1 of 2)
We all need to step up and start working to improve gender equality in computer science and engineering. In two blog posts, I give my view of this fascinating and frustrating problem. I provide three suggestions for how to get started.
Making PL Ideas Accessible: An Open-Source, Open-Access, Interactive Journal
Academic communities have increased the reach and accessibility of their work by publishing interactive, open-access, open-source articles on the web that explain both core and emerging ideas in their fields. It’s time for the PL community to do the same.
