POPL 2014: 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages San Diego, USA January 22-24, 2014

Important information

Call for papers

Scope

The annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of programming languages and systems, with emphasis on how principles underpin practice. Both theoretical and experimental papers are welcome, on topics ranging from formal frameworks to experience reports. Papers discussing new ideas and areas are most welcome, as are high-quality expositions or elucidations of existing concepts that are likely to yield new insights ("pearls").

Evaluation

The program committee will evaluate the technical contribution of each submission as well as its accessibility to both experts and the general POPL audience. All papers will be judged on significance, originality, relevance, correctness, and clarity. Each paper should explain its contributions in both general and technical terms, identifying what has been accomplished, explaining why it is significant, and comparing it with previous work. More advice on writing technical papers can be found on the SIGPLAN author information page.

A document that details principles underlying organizational and reviewing policies can be found here.

Submission guidelines

Authors should submit an abstract of at most 300 words and a full paper of no more than 12 pages (including bibliography and appendices) formatted according to the ACM proceedings format. Papers that exceed the length requirement or are submitted late will be rejected.

Templates for ACM format are available for Word Perfect, Microsoft Word, and LaTeX at http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author (use the 9 pt preprint template). Submissions should be in PDF and printable on US Letter and A4 sized paper.

Submitted papers must adhere to the SIGPLAN Republication Policy and the ACM Policy on Plagiarism. Concurrent submissions to other conferences, workshops, journals, or similar forums of publication are not allowed.

Authors of pearl submissions should clearly indicate the submission is a pearl in the title and abstract.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: All accepted papers will be available from the ACM Digital Library two weeks prior to the conference, starting from January 8, 2014. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

POPL 2014 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing process. To facilitate this, submitted papers must adhere to two rules:

• author names and institutions must be omitted, and
• references to authors' own related work should be in the third person (e.g., not "We build on our previous work ..." but rather "We build on the work of ...").

The purpose of this is to help the PC and external reviewers come to an initial judgement about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized, and submitted papers may be posted to author web pages etc. as usual). The program chair has put together a document answering frequently asked questions that hopefully addresses many common concerns.

POPL 2014 will not have an external review committee, relying instead on the PC and on expert reviewers drawn from the whole community. To assist the PC in identifying expert reviewers, authors will be invited to suggest, at submission time, the names of up to 5 candidate reviewers that they believe have the appropriate expertise. Authors should not contact these in advance (in particular, do not discuss with them whether or not they are prepared to review the paper). The PC may or may not call for reviews from any of those suggested.

We encourage authors to provide any supplementary material that is required to support the claims made in the paper, such as detailed proofs, proof scripts, or experimental data. This should be uploaded at submission time, as a single pdf or a tarball, not via a URL. It need not be anonymised, and so will be made available to reviewers only after they have submitted their first-draft review. As usual, reviewers are under no obligation to look at the supplementary material.

We will also repeat the survey from POPL 2009 to gather statistics on the use of proof assistants.