General Chair's Welcome
On behalf of the entire SPLASH organizing committee, I am delighted to welcome you to Vancouver BC Canada for SPLASH 2017!
This year marks the 8th occurrence of SPLASH, which serves as an umbrella event that embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery. At the center of SPLASH is OOPSLA, a flagship conference of ACM SIGPLAN with a now 32-year history. OOPSLA is a broad conference, covering all aspects and paradigms of programming languages and systems. This year marks the fourth time OOPSLA will be held in Vancouver, which has emerged as a dynamic tech hub on both the Canadian and global scene.
In addition to OOPSLA, SPLASH 2017 provides another 30 tracks, including four co-hosted conferences, two symposia and 19 workshops.
Onward! is a multidisciplinary conference that focuses on everything to do with programming and software. Onward! aspires to be more radical, visionary and open to enable discussion of ideas that are emerging and well-argued, but not yet proven. Onward! Essays provides a venue for clear and compelling pieces of writing about topics important to the software community.
SPLASH also welcomes three other co-hosted conferences.
The International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experience (GPCE) explores techniques that use program generation, domain-speci c languages, and component deployment to increase programmer productivity, improve software quality, and shorten the time-to-market of software products.
The International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss the application of systematic, disciplined, and measurable approaches to the development, use, deployment and maintenance of software languages.
The International Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) welcomes pattern authors and enthusiasts to gather, discuss and learn more about patterns and software development.
Two co-hosted symposia provide further breadth to SPLASH. The ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Scala, is the leading forum for researchers and practitioners related to the Scala programming language. The 13th Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) is a forum for research on dynamic languages, whose use and influence continues to grow.
The SPLASH-I track follows in the style pioneered in SPLASH 2016. This track runs in parallel with other events from Wednesday through Friday and features world-class speakers from industry and academia with insightful, inspiring and interactive talks about innovation in software. SPLASH-I also includes a dynamic panel entitled, “50 Years of Language Evolution: From Simula ’67 to the Future”.
SPLASH-E provides a forum for software and languages researchers to meet and discuss topics around computer education. This year’s program touches on a wide range of topics from the use of open source in the classroom to ensuring success of diverse student groups in the classroom.
The Posters track allows researchers to share preliminary work during two poster receptions. In addition to posters specifically submitted to and accepted by the Posters track, the poster sessions also feature posters by authors of accepted papers in one of the SPLASH tracks and by students participating in the ACM Student Research Competition.
The Doctoral Symposium provides students with useful guidance on completing their dissertation research and beginning their research careers. SPLASH welcomes the students and thanks the mentors for their detailed and helpful comments to shape programming language and system research of the future.
To help continue to foster diversity in the community, the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) encourages undergraduates and rst and second year graduate students to pursue research careers in programming languages and software engineering. An exciting group of speakers will provide background on research in programming languages and software engineering and will help de-mystify the graduate school experience.
I am also very pleased to welcome three distinguished keynote speakers: Chris Granger, Crista Lopes and Lera Boroditsky. In his keynote, Chris discusses what it means to augment humans by describing Eve, his vision for putting computation in the hands of everyone. Crista’s keynote takes a look back at object-oriented programming and considers what happens as the data on which we compute turns from a sea of data into a massive ocean of data. Lera’s background is in cognitive science and her keynote discusses how language shapes the way humans think.
I am grateful to the many, many volunteers who have helped make this edition of SPLASH a reality. I am especially grateful to all the members of the Organizing Committee, who have worked tirelessly to bring together the many moving parts of SPLASH. I am thankful to the general chairs and program chairs of the various tracks who have put together a fantastic set of content for participants to experience and enjoy. The workshop chairs, publicity and web chairs, posters chairs, publications chairs and conference manager have played critical roles in enabling a wide range of forums to incite discussion and to get the word out. A special thank you goes to the authors and speakers for submitting their work to SPLASH: your contributions are at the core of SPLASH. I also thank our conference sponsors whose nancial contributions enable SPLASH to be the conference it is.
Finally, thank you to the attendees for coming to Vancouver! I hope that you nd the program to be interesting and to enable you to think in new directions. I hope that you will have a great time and be inspired by the amazing research presented and ideas generated at SPLASH 2017!
Gail C. Murphy
SPLASH 2017 General Chair
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC Canada