Due to the COVID situation, I have, in the past 2 weeks, been approached by several people whose conferences are being cancelled asking me for advice on how to organize a virtual conference. For the past 7 years, I have been vocal about the OpenSimulator Community Conference, a purely virtual conference held in a 3D […]

The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming journal is teaming up with the Onward! conference regarding essays. In this year’s Onward! Essays’ Instructions for Authors, authors are given the choice of publication venue. They can either do it as before — i.e. publish the essay in the Onward! proceedings book, published by the ACM; or they can […]

This post is primarily targeted at the Computer Science research communities that surround the ACM and the IEEE, but it applies to all tech communities that gravitate around conferences. I believe that an overwhelming majority of people in these communities is concerned about the effect that global warming is having on the Earth’s climate; many of us […]

I’ve been relatively low key about something that I’m very excited about, so, after several months of planning, and a first, somewhat quiet, submission deadline, it’s time to release my enthusiasm. A group of us have started a new conference called <Programming>  associated with a new open-access journal called The Art, Science and Engineering of Programming. Here […]

This is the story of Jan Vitek and I approaching the ACM Publications Board with a proposal for publishing the OOPSLA papers in a journal. Even though we did this together, the analysis and opinions in this post are mine alone. TL;DR: if there’s any lesson to be learned from the ACM Publications Board’s policies on scientific publication is […]

I’ve seen the future of conferences. And it runs my code!

Serving as Program Committee Chair of OOPSLA 2013 has been an enlightening experience, and I’d like to share one more insight I’ve gained (I wrote about another one here). Specifically, I want to focus on the acceptance rate.

I recently watched a TED talk with a fun topic: why is ‘x’ used as the unknown variable in Algebra and beyond? If you haven’t seen it, this 4-min talk is above. The thesis is this: x is used, because the Spanish, who were the first to translate the great scientific and engineering knowledge coming […]

    I’m chairing SPLASH/OOPSLA this year. That means that I’m like a Producer, I get to do all the work behind the scenes in order to make the conference come to life. And it’s finally coming to life. After one year and a half of “programming,” I just pressed “Run.” It’s a little crazy […]