Call for Papers: IFL 2010

I'm involved with planning IFL 2010, the 22nd Symposium on Implementation and Applications of Functional Languages, held in Alphen aan den Rijn in the Netherlands. Of course, I think you should consider submitting something to the conference. Note that submissions are reviewed after the symposium for the proceedings, so it's easy to use the venue as a way to refine incomplete/unfinished products. The call for papers follows.

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22nd Symposium on Implementation and Applications of Functional Languages (IFL 2010)
September 1-3, 2010
Utrecht University
Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/IFL2010

After a first successful visit to the USA, the Symposium on Implementation and Applications of Functional Languages returns to Europe for its 22nd edition. The hosting institution is Utrecht University in the Netherlands, although the conference itself will take place in the ornithological theme park Avifauna in Alphen aan den Rijn, situated conveniently close to Schiphol (Amsterdam Airport). The symposium dates are September 1-3, 2010.

The goal of the IFL symposia is to bring together researchers actively engaged in the implementation and application of functional and function-based programming languages. IFL 2010 will be a venue for researchers to present and discuss new ideas and concepts, work in progress, and publication-ripe results related to the implementation and application of functional languages and function-based programming.

Following the IFL tradition, IFL 2010 will use a post-symposium review process to produce formal proceedings which will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. All participants in IFL 2010 are invited to submit either a draft paper or an extended abstract describing work to be presented at the symposium. At no time may work submitted to IFL be simultaneously submitted to other venues. Here we follow the ACM Sigplan republication policy. The submissions will be screened by the program committee chair to make sure they are within the scope of IFL, and will appear in the draft proceedings distributed at the symposium. Submissions appearing in the draft proceedings are not peer-reviewed publications. After the symposium, authors will be given the opportunity to incorporate the feedback from discussions at the symposium and will be invited to submit a revised full article for the formal review process. These revised submissions will be reviewed by the program committee using prevailing academic standards to select the best articles, which will appear in the formal proceedings.

INVITED SPEAKER

Johan Nordlander of Lulea University, the designer and developer of the Timber language, is the invited speaker at IFL 2010. Timber is a functional programming language that draws some of its concepts from object-oriented programming, and has built-in facilities for concurrent execution. The language is specifically targeted at implementing real-time embedded systems.

TOPICS

IFL welcomes submissions describing practical and theoretical work as well as submissions describing applications and tools. If you are not sure that your work is appropriate for IFL 2010, please contact the PC chair at jur@cs.uu.nl. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• language concepts
• type checking
• contracts
• compilation techniques
• staged compilation
• runtime function specialization
• runtime code generation
• partial evaluation
• (abstract) interpretation
• generic programming techniques
• automatic program generation
• array processing
• concurrent/parallel programming
• concurrent/parallel program execution
• functional programming and embedded systems
• functional programming and web applications
• functional programming and security
• novel memory management techniques
• runtime profiling and performance measurements
• debugging and tracing
• virtual/abstract machine architectures
• validation and verification of functional programs
• tools and programming techniques
• industrial applications of functional programming

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

Prospective authors are encouraged to submit papers or extended abstracts to be published in the draft proceedings and to present them at the symposium. All contributions must be written in English, conform to the Springer-Verlag LNCS series format and not exceed 16 pages. The draft proceedings will appear as a technical report of the Department of Computer Science of Utrecht University.

PETER LANDIN PRIZE

The Peter Landin Prize is awarded to the best paper presented at the symposium every year. The honored article is selected by the program committee based on the submissions received for the formal review process. The prize carries a cash award equivalent to 150 Euros.

IMPORTANT DATES

Draft proceedings submission deadline	July 25, 2010
Registration deadline	August 1, 2010
IFL 2010 Symposium	September 1-3, 2010
Submission for review process deadline	October 25, 2010
Notification Accept/Reject	December 22, 2010
Camera ready version	February 17, 2011

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Jost Berthold	University of Copenhagen (DIKU), Denmark
Olaf Chitil	University of Kent, UK
John Clements	California Polytechnic State University, USA
Matthew Fluet	Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Andy Gill	Kansas University, USA
Jurriaan Hage (Chair)	University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Bastiaan Heeren	Open University, Netherlands
Ralf Hinze	University of Oxford, UK
John Hughes	Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Yukiyoshi Kameyama	University of Tsukuba, Japan
Gabriele Keller	University of New South Wales, Australia
Pieter Koopman	Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
Luc Maranget	INRIA, France
Simon Marlow	Microsoft Research, UK
Marco T. Morazan	Seton Hall University, USA
Rex Page	University of Oklahoma, USA
Ricardo Pena	Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Sven-Bodo Scholz	University of Hertfordshire, UK
Tom Schrijvers	Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
Don Stewart	Galois, USA
Wouter Swierstra	Vector Fabrics, Netherlands
Don Syme	Microsoft, UK
Peter Thiemann	University of Freiburg, Germany
Phil Trinder	Heriott-Watt University, Scotland
Janis Voigtlaender	University of Bonn, Germany
Viktoria Zsok	Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary

Final: "Push-Ups, Push-Downs, and Passing It Around: Exercises in Functional Incrementalization"

We have put up the final copy of our IFL 2009 paper. Here are the PDF and source code.

Abstract Programs in languages such as Haskell are often datatype-centric and make extensive use of folds on that datatype. Incrementalization of such a program can significantly improve its performance by transforming monolithic atomic folds into incremental computations. Functional incrementalization separates the recursion from the application of the algebra in order to reduce redundant computations and reuse intermediate results. In this paper, we motivate incrementalization with a simple example and present a library for transforming programs using upwards, downwards, and circular incrementalization. Our benchmarks show that incrementalized computations using the library are nearly as fast as handwritten atomic functions.

The focus is quite a bit different from the draft submission. We concentrate more on describing how to specify incrementalized computations. We also compare the performance of handwritten atomic functions, specifications written with folds, and incrementalized functions. We found that incrementalization had a relatively small impact on an atomic function's performance. If you have the right needs, of course, the impact on your program time can be profound.