OCaml 2020

The OCaml Users and Developers Workshop brings together industrial users of OCaml with academics and hackers who are working on extending the language, type system, and tools. Previous editions have been co-located with ICFP 2012 in Copenhagen, ICFP 2013 in Boston, ICFP 2014 in Gothenburg, ICFP 2015 in Vancouver, ICFP 2016 in Nara, ICFP 2017 in Oxford, ICFP 2018 in St Louis, and ICFP 2019 in Berlin, following the OCaml Meetings in Paris in 2010 and 2011.

OCaml 2020 will be held on August 28th, 2020 in New Jersey, USA, co-located with ICFP 2020.

Accepted Papers

Call for Presentations

Scope

Presentations and discussions focus on the OCaml programming language and its community. We aim to solicit talks on all aspects related to improving the use or development of the language and its programming environment, including, for example (but not limited to):

• compiler developments, new backends, runtime and architectures
• practical type system improvements, such as GADTs, first-class modules, generic programming, or dependent types
• new library or application releases, and their design rationales
• tools and infrastructure services, and their enhancements
• prominent industrial or experimental uses of OCaml, or deployments in unusual situations.

Presentations

Presentations will be held in the online format. Each presentation comprise a prerecorded presentation and an interactive live Q&A session after the talk. Each talk will be re-translated three times in different time zones. Session chairs and volunteers will assist the authors in preparing and casting the presentation. Each presentation will be made available through the ocaml.org website.

Submission

To submit a presentation, please register a description of the talk (about 2 pages long) at https://ocaml2020.hotcrp.com/ providing a clear statement of what will be provided by the presentation: the problems that are addressed, the solutions or methods that are proposed.

LaTeX-produced PDFs are a common and welcome submission format. For accessibility purposes, we ask PDF submitters to also provide the sources of their submission in a textual format, such as .tex sources. Reviewers may read either the submitted PDF or the text version.

Camera ready presentations

A pre-recorded versions of accepted presentation shall be provided before August, 14th. Volunteers will provide technical assistance to authors as well as provide necessary feedback and ensure that all videos match our quality standards.

Important dates

• Friday 29th May (any time zone): Abstract submission deadline (extended)
• Friday 17th July: Author notification
• Friday 14th August: Camera-ready deadline
• Friday 28th August: OCaml Workshop

ML family workshop

The ML family workshop, held on the previous day, deals with general issues of the ML-style programming and type systems, focuses on more research-oriented work that is less specific to a language in particular. There is an overlap between the two workshops, and we have occasionally transferred presentations from one to the other in the past. Authors who feel their submission fits both workshops are encouraged to mention it at submission time and/or contact the Program Chairs.

Call for Tutorials

In addition and in preparation to the workshop we plan a series of interactive tutorials addressing various aspects of the OCaml infrastructure. If you’re willing to host a tutorial that you think will be interesting to the general community, please contact the Organizing Committee (ivg@ieee.org).

Call for Volunteers

The virtual format of the conference poses new challenges and requires people with special talents and training. The Organizing Committee is seeking for members who will volunteer to fill one (or more) of the following roles:

1. AV Editor
2. Session Host
3. Transcribers/Interpreter
4. Content Manager
5. Accessibility Chair

The roles are described in details below. We are asking prospective Organizing Committee members to contact the Committee chair (ivg@ieee.org), indicating which role(s) they are ready to take.

AV Editor

AV (Audio/Video) editors are responsible for previewing the presentations and providing help and feedback to the authors. Ideally we target for one editor per talk.

Duties

• Preview and (if necessary) post-process or (ask the author to shoot again) the pre-recorded videos.
• Advise authors and help in choice of software and hardware, teach how to set up the camera, light, make sure that the audio is of good quality and, in general, channel our quality guidelines.
• Ensure that all videos are of the same quality, the audio levels are the same, and that everything is loud and clear.

Session Hosts

Session hosts will assist session chairs in streaming the pre-recorded videos as well as helping and moderating the Q&A sessions and the panel session. They will also be responsible for security and be ready to react to potential threats and wrongdoers. Since we will broadcast sessions in several time zones we need several hosts for each session.

Duties

• Moderating the text chats
• Controlling microphones in the video-conferencing
• Watching for the time
• Performing sound checks
• Welcoming and otherwise guiding participants

Transcribers / Interpreters

We would like to have at least English transcriptions for each talk and translations to other languages are very welcome. Transcriptions enable accessibility as well as potentially increase the audience and publicity as they could be indexed by the search engines.

Duties

• Create transcriptions for videos, potentially in other languages.

Content Manager

The content manager will be responsible for maintaining the web presence of the conference on https://ocaml.org/. We plan to have all videos available, as well as maintain a page for each submitted work.

Accessibility Chair

We are striving to make the conference accessible to everyone and we are looking for volunteers who have experience in online accessibility.

Duties

• Helping with the selection of accessible platforms and tools​.
• Working with attendees​ to ensure the necessary access services are included.
• Establishing best practices ​for preparing and running accessible sessions.