JuliaCon presentations have ranged from introductory to advanced, with speakers from industry and academia. To get a feel for previous years’ presentations, take a look at our past programmes and recordings: (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). We are interested in all topics that have to do with Julia, including the following incomplete list:

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

The most important consideration is whether the topic would be interesting to the Julia community.

Proposal Types

• Talks are 30 minutes long, including 5 minutes allocated for questions from the audience.
• Lightning talks are 10 minutes long, including 2 minutes allocated for audience questions.
• Minisymposia are a conference-within-a-conference: the organizers of a minisymposia will have a two hour slot into which they may schedule speakers, panels, or discussions as they best see fit. Organizers must provide their own moderator/chair for the minisymposia.
• Workshops are half day (3 hour) interactive sessions. These will be run on the days before the standard conference in special rooms with laptop accommodations. Topics such as package tutorials and hackathons are reasonable; note that these may not be recorded.
• Posters are presented during an evening session inspiring discussion and collaboration with the Julia community. Awards will be given to top poster presentations.
• Birds of Feather are breakout sessions for organized discussions around specific topics. For example, package maintainers can use these times to organize a meeting with and recruit contributors, or community members can organize discussion groups for Julia teaching materials or diversity recruitment. Note that these will not be recorded.

When submitting your proposal (abstract), you may select multiple categories for consideration.

Proposal Advice

Take a look at the example proposal for the structure. The bolded abstract should be a short description that invites the audience to the talk, and the description section should be an extended discussion of your topic and its findings.

• When thinking about what makes a good topic, ask yourself what kind of presentation would make you or your friends excited.
• Talk about your own experiences. You could tell us how you use Julia in your work or for a project.
• We are interested in both innovations you developed and restrictions you encountered in Julia.
• It may be a good idea to review previous JuliaCon presentations for inspiration and ideas.
• If you are presenting about a certain project, package, or company, include links to guide the reader to more information.
• Proposals must be in clear English. Please seek help from mentors or other community members if you feel you need to!
• Try not to assume familiarity with your subject when writing the abstract; the average reader is most likely not an expert in your area of expertise.
• Avoid opaque titles; while witty titles are good, an informative title is essential. Note you will have a chance to tweak the title after being accepted.
• Avoid infomercials; while we love to hear how you use Julia in your company, JuliaCon is not the place to sell your product.
• If you want feedback before submitting a proposal or if you are interested in the mentorship program, contact us at juliacon@julialang.org or fill out the mentorship request well ahead of the deadline. If you are interested in mentoring, please fill out the call for mentors!

If you have doubts about becoming a speaker, check out the website We are all awesome.

We look forward to your proposals and to seeing you at JuliaCon 2020!

Submission process

We are using an anonymized submissions process, to avoid selection bias related to the speaker. While enforcing double blind is impossible since most submissions should link to public open source code, all efforts are made to ensure impartial review of submissions.

Recordings and materials

We plan to video record all talks, lightning talks, and minisymposia and will make them available after the conference. We do this for those who cannot attend. If you are uncomfortable with having your talk recorded, however, please contact juliacon@julialang.org; being recorded is not a requirement to attend JuliaCon or to give a presentation. Finally, we also ask you to make your materials and recording available under a Creative Commons (default: no commercial reuse) or other open source license.

Proceeding Publications

This year we are offering willing participants the chance to have their work published as part of a JuliaCon proceedings publication. More details forthcoming.

Registration for speakers

Speakers are required to pay the registration fees. Speakers can apply for travel funding and will be prioritized. Speakers from underrepresented groups at JuliaCon will be prioritized for funding. Please fill out the application to request funding support - this will have no impact on your submission’s review process. Fees for workshop organizers will be waived.

Poster Awards

The highest quality posters will be given awarded by the committee. The poster award criteria will use the same judging criteria as the review process but will take into account the live explanation. Judges will be clearly identified.

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, in English, 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 on the Call for Proposal

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

1. If the format requested by the author (lightning talk, talk, workshop, poster, minisymposium, birds-of-feathers) does not seem appropriate, the reviewer can signal it and suggest another one.

2. 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 talk 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? Higher scoring proposals should be code or ideas that others can use.

3. Clarity. What is the purpose of this talk? 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, just significance as a software or tutorial to users of Julia.

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

• The workshop proposals will be curated by the program committee (Chris Rackauckas, Lyndon White, Renee Spear). All of the workshop proposers with proposals meeting a certain level of scrutiny will be contacted and a coherent workshop schedule will be decided on based on these submissions.

• Talks, Lightning Talks, Posters, and 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 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.

• A special symposia for Google Summer of Code student lightning talks will be reserved. This is kept for later in the process since the approval/rejection of proposals is BEFORE GSoC students are accepted. These proposals will be directly reviewed by the review committee.

Review Comments

Each review should include a comment with the score that justifies the score. For example, a comment may be like:

• "This proposal was given a 5 because it is clear, a very new application of Julia (to me), and it introduces a new package which I think many may find useful"

• "This proposal was given a 2 because, 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".

This Call for Papers closed on 2020-03-16 00:00 (UTC).