This Call for Proposals closed on January 31st 2024 23:59 (CET). convert to your timezone

Deadline for minisymposia was on December 19th 2023 23:59 (CET). convert to your timezone

We invite you to submit proposals to give a talk at JuliaCon 2024

JuliaCon has traditionally had talks that ranged from introductory to advanced, on topics related to various fields, and from developers and researchers from industry and academia. If you have worked on Julia in the past, JuliaCon is the best venue to share your work with the Julia community.

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 and 2023).

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 ecosystem
• Numerical and mathematical optimization
• Scientific computing
• Computational Quantum 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 would be interesting to the Julia community.

Proposal Types

This year, we will have 6 different types under which you can submit proposals. See below for further details.

Talks

This track is primarily dedicated to sharing your technical work with the Julia community, whether it is related to software development, research, or applications from a specific field.

• Talks are 30 minutes long, including 5 minutes allocated for questions from the audience.
• Note: If you have given a full-length talk about a specific Julia package in the past, we prefer that you submit your "What's new with xyz.jl" talk as a lighting talk to give new packages more room to share. Of course, if there are significant changes we may consider that enough to warrant a full talk instead of a lighting talk.
• Lightning talks are 10 minutes long, including 2 minutes allocated for audience questions.

Minisymposia

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

• deadline is already on December 15th 2023. Accepted minisymposia will be published before JuliaCon CFP ends, allowing people to choose whether to submit ot JuliaCon or a minisymposium.
• The proposal should also include either a call for submissions or a proposed list of speakers.
• A minisimposium 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.

Workshops

A workshop is usually a three hour interactive hands-on session where the presenter live codes in front of the audience and shares code with attendees to allow them to follow easily. Workshops will take place before the official start date of the conference. Example topics on this track include package-specific tutorials or field-specific tutorials. Note: Workshops are likely to happen on the days before the conference.

Posters

Posters will be presented in person at JuliaCon 2024.

Birds of a Feather / Interest groups

Birds of feather sessions 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. These sessions will be allocated a one hour timeslot, and will not be recorded.

Experiences

The purpose of this track is to welcome new members in the community. Example topics include your favorite features in Julia, how Julia has helped you solve a certain problem, an interesting problem you solved with Julia in a university class, or, more generally, how Julia has been a good addition to your workflow. These presentations will each last three minutes and will be interspersed throughout different sessions in the conference. We encourage you to show contact information such as twitter handle or github handle or email on your slides if you’d welcome any offline questions, as there won’t be allocated time for questions in this track. We especially welcome newcomers to Julia to share their impressions with the community using this track. If you are a teacher or professor using Julia in your teaching, we encourage you to invite your students to apply to share their experiences with the Julia community.

Submission details

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.

If you are submitting a workshop or birds-of-a-feather session that you think would particularly benefit from being held at a certain time, please note this in your proposal.

Abstract vs Description

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

Recordings and materials

JuliaCon 2024 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.

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 must register for the conference. Details forthcoming.

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 on the Call for Proposals

• 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
• Computational humanities and social science

1. If the format requested by the author (experience, lightning talk, talk, workshop, poster, minisymposium, birds-of-a-feather) 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. 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.

• Some slots might be reserved for Google Summer of Code student to present their work. 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 that justifies the scores that were given. For example, a comment may be like:

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

• "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".