General Chair Welcome

Kia ora!

Welcome to the SPLASH 2022! After two years of virtual only (SPLASH 2020), closed borders USA only (SPLASH 2021), we finally feel the reopening and going back to the pre-Covid in person vibe of the 37th OOPSLA/SPLASH. I am especially proud of having SPLASH outside of the USA/Canada region for the 3rd time in its history and the first time it is held in the Asia Pacific. We invited the Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS) to co-locate with us for the 3rd year in a row to celebrate this occasion.

The traditional dates for OOPSLA/SPLASH have always been Sunday to Friday and we have stuck to this tradition by keeping it in the New Zealand time zone (18 hours behind the East Coast) Monday to Saturday on the 5th to the 10th December 2022. We are joined by the stalwarts of the SPALSH umbrella: OOPSLA, Onward! Papers, Onward! Essays, Software Language Engineering (SLE), International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences (GPCE), and the Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) as well as the relative newcomer to the SPLASH conferences: the long running 29th Static Analysis Symposium (SAS).

Our program is completed by the seven excellent workshops: FTSCS, HATRA, LIVE, PAINT, REBLS, VMIL, and Unsound, the traditional Student Research Competition, Posters, Doctoral Symposium, Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, and SPLASH-E. As well as four excellent keynotes and a panel to encourage the mixing of attendees from all the different events that make SPLASH (Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity) such a unique event and one of the broadest conferences on the SIGPLAN annual calendar.

SPLASH 2022 is also going to be the first SPLASH without two former general chairs William Cook and Eelco Visser. William Cook originated the renaming of OOPSLA into SPLASH and was its inaugural SPLASH General Chair in 2010 in Reno/Tahoe, while Eelco Visser was the General Chair in 2016 and was the first person to bring SPLASH/OOPSLA to the outside of the US/Canada in its long history. We will miss them both.

We would like to thank your generous sponsors: Google Research Australia, Meta Research, AWS and Prime Video, Uber, Oracle Labs Australia, Adobe, and IBM, as well as our in kind venue supporter — the leading University in New Zealand — University of Auckland. Finally, last but not least I would like to thank the Australian National University as the only staunch supporter of SPLASH 2022 taking place Down Under from the time the original idea and planning started in 2019 with Tony Hosking and myself approaching the SPLASH SC during PLDI 2019 in Arizona. I also thank both my current research group on Secure Software Systems and my previous Software and Programming research Group and I hope you will use this time to acquaint yourselves with the excellent PL research undertaken in Australasia and go beyond Auckland, to perhaps visit the rest of New Zealand or Australia where there are PL researchers in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, as well as Wellington, Hamilton, Christchurch, and many other places who are always looking to both collaborate and hire interested Staff, Postdocs, or PhD students!

At the Early Bird Registration deadline we already have over 350 people registered — looking likely to meet the similar numbers of pre-Covid non-US SPLASH locations of around 400 attendees. Around 30% of our registrations are from the USA or Canada, 30% from the EU or UK, 25% from Asia and around 5% each from Australia and New Zealand.

Finally, my huge thanks goes to the hard work of the organising committee that worked tirelessly as we faced the delays of Covid to make this event a possibility, in particular, I’d like to acknowledge Dr Andreea Costea who was always happy to step in and ensure our online presence was of high quality, informative, and up to date and Dr Kelly Blincoe who ensured that all the local Auckland logistics was taken care of. Our SIGPLAN PCO Neringa Young has now become a familiar face to all the attendees at POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and SPLASH and yet again proved invaluable making the job of the General Chair relatively stress free despite all the challenges of travel and Covid. If you see Dr Costea, Dr Blincoe, or Neringa - please remember to thank them for making SPLASH 2022 happen!

The rest of the committee and the many program committee chairs and workshop chairs did an amazing job in the run up to the conference with around 40 or 50 people putting their time an effort every single year to make the event such as SPLASH happen, as well as the additional 30 student volunteers that you will see helping you around both online and in person during the conference. Thanks again for coming down and hope you enjoy your stay!

Ngā mihi nui,
Alex.

Dr Alex Potanin (he/him)
Associate Professor
The Australian National University
General Chair of SPLASH 2022
https://potanin.github.io

The Australian National University acknowledges, celebrates, and pays our respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work, and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history.