The schedule of POPL 2022 is organized as a traditional in-person conference in Philadelphia’s time zone, but there will be an associated virtual workshop on January 27th and 28th, 2022! We are trying to maintain the momentum of inclusive virtual conferences while taking advantage of the opportunity (fingers crossed) for a strong in-person component. The virtual conference will be focused on interactive activities, not talk-watching (as main-conference talk videos will be available publicly a few days prior). Registration for the main conference includes virtual-workshop participation, while a cheaper option is available for virtual-only (which includes the ability to watch the main conference’s livestreams and ask speakers text questions from within our conference software).

Here is information on the activities that we have lined up.

Keynotes

Lukasz Kaiser from OpenAI will present their Codex system, including an interactive demo and Q&A. This is the programming-by-machine-learning system that has so many people excited lately!

Andreas Rossberg is a lead designer of the formal semantics for WebAssembly, in addition to playing other key roles in the design and support of that language, meant to be the ideal cross-platform compiler target for the web and more. He will tell us about the social and technical sides of that effort. If you haven’t already, you might want to consider targeting WebAssembly from your next research compiler!

Tutorials

Rustan Leino will show off some of the more advanced features of his Dafny verification tool and stand ready to try small examples the audience requests.

Hakjoo Oh will teach us how to bring machine-learning tools into PL research.

Panels

We are assembling panelists to share their views and take your questions on the future of proof assistants for programming languages and math and the future of concurrency and parallelism.

Networking and mentoring

When you set up your profile in our virtual-conference software, you can indicate interest in particular kinds of interactions:

• Interested in jobs at the POPL sponsor companies
• Seeking or hiring for PhD or faculty positions
• Giving or receiving mentoring for junior faculty
• Giving or receiving mentoring for senior PhD students or postdocs

Each of the four categories will have two scheduled speed-networking sessions, where you will be matched automatically with people on the other side of the interest you indicated. Conversations will be short, and we will provide a way to schedule additional one-on-one conversations, when you find a good match. The conference software will help you keep track of which meetings you have scheduled, as well as hosting their video calls.

Chat with POPL Week authors

Our schedule will include ample time for less-structured social interactions. We will provide an online bulletin board for authors (of any POPL Week papers/presentations) to make known when they will be available to take your questions in video chat within our unified virtual-conference platform. We’re also glad to see any uses of that bulletin board to organize birds-of-a-feather sessions or whatever else.

Activities

Call for Proposals

The schedule of POPL 2022 is organized as a traditional in-person conference in Philadelphia’s time zone, but there will be an associated virtual workshop on January 27th and 28th, 2022! We are trying to maintain the momentum of inclusive virtual conferences while taking advantage of the opportunity (fingers crossed) for a strong in-person component. The virtual conference will be focused solely on interactive activities, not talk-watching (as main-conference talk videos will be available publicly a few days prior). The organizers would like to solicit your ideas on how to use the time.

Please e-mail your ideas for scheduled activities to popl22-virtual@mit.edu. You may propose activities you would run yourself, or you may suggest activities that would require other people you don’t know very well, and we organizers can try to convince them to participate, if your idea is selected. (E.g., feel free to suggest “interview with Elon Musk,” and we can try to decide if that’s appropriate and feasible. :])

Here are a few ideas of kinds of activities:

• A panel bringing together experts on a popular topic, to answer live audience questions and discuss with each other
• An “ask me anything” (AMA) session with a specific member of the POPL community
• A particular format of social or networking event, maybe based on a specific game or different virtual-space service online
• Tool demos and tutorials
• Activities designed to further our community’s strategy for mitigating climate change or improving diversity, equity, and inclusion

We are especially interested in scheduling events across a wide range of time bands, to accommodate participants from many countries, so please include thoughts on timing in proposals. We expect to provide a shared platform supporting standard video conferencing, from small groups up to hundreds of participants (most with video recording off), so there is no need to propose case-by-case solutions there (though there is room for a few sessions using fun alternative communication apps).

Our expectation is that there will be some explicit registration process to join the workshop, but the fee will be no more than $10 per person. We will also provide some kind of “bulletin board” where people can post their interest in smaller-group interactions (for instance, chats with the authors of particular POPL 2022 papers, or informal meetings with potential employers) and facilitate scheduling times to meet together on the shared workshop platform. Other logistical details to follow.