This Call for Minisymposia Proposals will close on December 1st 2024 23:59 (CET). convert to your timezone

We invite you to submit proposals to organize a minisymposium at JuliaCon 2025.

JuliaCon has traditionally had minisymposia on topics related to various fields, including high performance computing, quantum computing, Julia in life sciences, and many others. If you have worked on Julia in the past, JuliaCon is the best venue to share your work with the Julia community. If you have not worked with Julia, a minisymposium related to your field is an opportunity to introduce your professional community to the language.

To get a feel for previous years’ presentations, take a look at our past programs and recordings: (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023), and 2024.

What is a minisymposium?

A minisymposium is a “conference-within-a-conference” where the organizers are responsible for scheduling speakers, panels, and discussions as they see fit. Organizers of a minisymposium are also expected to provide a moderator or chair for the session. A minisymposium is allocated a two to three hour slot.

Minisymposia submission details

• Accepted minisymposia will be published before the main JuliaCon CFP ends, allowing people to choose whether to submit to JuliaCon as a whole or to a specific minisymposium (i.e. yours).
• The minisymposium proposal should also include either a call for submissions or a proposed list of speakers. You may choose to invite some speakers and solicit others through a CfP review process.
• A minisymposium can also be in a different language, e.g. "Julia in Klingon". In that case, the organizer is responsible for issuing the CfP in the appropriate language and translate the Code of Conduct. The minisymposium submission should still be in English and an English version of the CfP should be provided as well.
• Minisymposia submissions should include either a premade list of speakers or a ready CFP to be published.
• Please also indicate in your submission whether you are open to the JuliaCon committee folding other talks submitted to "main JuliaCon" into your minisymposium -- in every case you will be consulted to give final approval to any such inclusion. Our goal with this option is to allow minis to "grow organically" if it turns out there is strong interest in, for example, Julia for Econometrics this year.

We are interested to hear about all topics that have to do with Julia. Examples of such topics are:

• Biology, bioinformatics, health, medicine, and health disparities
• Data analytics and visualization
• Finance and economics
• General computing
• Industrial applications
• Julia’s compiler, tooling, and internals
• Numerical and mathematical optimization
• Scientific computing
• Computational Physics/Chemistry
• Software for Quantum Computation
• Software engineering best practices
• Statistics, machine learning, and AI
• Computational humanities and social science
• The most important consideration is whether the topic of your minisymposium would be interesting to the Julia community.

We also welcome minisymposia that are focused on an application or field of study as an invitation for that community to try Julia.

Submission details

We are using an anonymized submissions process, to avoid selection bias related to the speakers and organizers. All efforts are made to ensure impartial review of submissions.

If you are submitting a minisymposium that you think would particularly benefit from being held at a certain time, please note this in your proposal. An example would be if you plan to submit a workshop related to your minisymposium and want the mini held the next day after workshops.

Abstract vs Description

In the submission form you are asked to include an abstract and a description for your minisymposium. The abstract should be a shorter, self-contained summary of the minisymposium. The description can contain more details, such as a draft schedule of the minisymposium, more background and so on. As a rule of thumb, write the abstract to spark interest and the description to give more details to the interested reader.

Recordings and materials

JuliaCon 2025 will be an in-person conference. In person talks will be live-streamed to Youtube. We also ask you to make your materials and recording available under a Creative Commons (default: no commercial reuse) or other open source license.

How to contact us

You can reach us with questions and concerns at juliacon@julialang.org.

Conference Code of Conduct

JuliaCon is dedicated to providing a positive conference experience for all attendees, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or national and ethnic origin. We encourage respectful and considerate interactions between attendees and do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. For example, offensive or sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including formal talks and networking between sessions. Conference participants violating these standards may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference (without a refund) at the discretion of the conference organizers. Our anti-harassment policy can be found here.

Appendix

Review Guidelines and Process

For reference, below are the guidelines and processes that readers will use in reviewing your submission.

The role of reviewers is to ensure the quality of the content presented at JuliaCon.

Conflict of interest

In any case of conflict of interest, the reviewer commits to withdraw from a review and signal it to the organizers to find a replacement quickly. No reviewer should enter a review on any talk in which they are an author or have another form of conflict of interest. See the PNAS guidelines for a definition and examples. Conflicts of interest include any work or authors with which the reviewer has "any association that poses or could be perceived as a financial or intellectual conflict of interest" (PNAS guidelines above).

Code of Conduct

The reviewer commits to reading and respecting the conference Code of Conduct in the assessment and all communications during the review process.

If a submitted abstract does not comply with the Code of Conduct, the reviewer should refer it to the organizing committee.

Criteria for the reviews

Failure to meet these criteria will result in lower scores.

1. The abstract should be easy to read and understandable for someone not working on the same topic. The title should make it easy to identify the topic of the content.

2. The abstract presented should be technically sound to the best of the reviewer's knowledge.

3. The subject should be of interest for JuliaCon, including but not limited to the topics listed below:

• Biology, bioinformatics, health, medicine, and health disparities
• Data analytics and visualization
• Finance and economics
• General computing
• Industrial applications
• Julia’s compiler, tooling, and internals
• Numerical and mathematical optimization
• Scientific computing
• Software engineering best practices
• Statistics, machine learning, and AI
• Computational humanities and social science

1. Use cases of Julia in an enterprise environment are in general of interest to the conference. In particular, feedback on product development using or interacting with Julia and its ecosystem are welcome. However, talks and posters are not a suitable venue for product placement.

Scoring Criteria

The following are the criteria by which scores (1-5) should be given:

1. Applicability to the Julia community. Would users of Julia be interested in this minisymposium for either its methods or its results? Higher scoring proposals should be of wide interest to Julia users.

2. Contributions to the community. Is this a new package for people to use? How will the minisymposium feed back into the wider Julia community? Higher scoring proposals should include ideas that others can use.

3. Clarity. What is the purpose of this minisymposium? What will people learn? Higher scoring proposals should be clear as to their purpose.

4. Significance to the community. Is this something that will change the way a lot of other people use Julia or its package ecosystem? Higher scoring proposals should be more significant to Julia users. Note that this does not require scientific significance.

5. Topic diversity. As a community we value the diversity of applications. Proposals which are targeting new areas and fields for the Julia community to expand should be given some credit.

6. Soundness. Proposals should be technically sound. Glaring incorrectness should be highlighted and taken into account.

7. Classification. The criteria will be stricter for longer presentations.

Review Process

• Minisymposia will be judged together in two rounds. In the first round, all reviewers will be given a selection of X many proposals to review, such that every proposal gets at least 3 reviews. Every review should include a score and a comment, at least a 1 sentence overview of their thoughts on the proposal. If any reviewers dropped out, we will have a second round to add more reviewers to those proposals by re-distributing to the active reviewers. After this round, the committee will ensure that each proposal has had 3 reviews.

• After the two review stages is the selection stage. The top proposals will be accepted and the bottom proposals will be rejected or re-classified and counted as a middle proposal. All proposals in the middle will then be marked for extra consideration. The amount of "top proposals" to be considered for stage 1 selection is dependent on the number of available speaker slots vs the number of proposals, and generally is reserved for average scores of 4+ without any comments of concern.

• In the second selection stage, the review committee will take the reviewer scores, comments, and re-classifications to decide the final acceptances. Rejected proposals will be discussed for re-classification before a full rejection.

• After all proposals have been classified, acceptances and rejections will be released.

Review Comments

Each review should include a comment that justifies the scores that were given. For example:

• "This minisymposium proposal identifies a specific target community (i.e. Julia HPC developers and users) with a well-defined plan to solicit talks from the wider community and a plan for invited talks from well known community maintainers X, Y, and Z. The organizers have justified why this topic is of interest to the Julia community as a whole and developed a plan to drive continuing discussion and contributions to JuliaHPC as a result of the mini."

• "While it seems to be state-of-the-art, the closedness and cost of the software makes the talk seem only targeted at a small enterprise audience and not of general Julia user interest. If the proposal focused more on their experience using Julia rather than their product, I would have seen it as more applicable to this conference".

You can enter proposals until 2024-12-01 23:59 (EST), 2 weeks from now.