2nd Programming for the Planet workshop CFP out / Apr 2025
Dominic Orchard and I had a blast running the first PROPL workshop a couple of years ago, with a full room and engaged audience in POPL in London. Last year, our sister conference LOCO took over, and it's our turn again this year! PROPL will return for a second outing in October, co-located with ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore in October. Read the call for papers here (deadline 3rd July 2025).
We'd love to get wider participation in computer science interacting with matters of climate and biodiversity:
There are simultaneous interlinked crises across the planet due to human actions: climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification. Addressing these challenges requires, amongst other things, a global understanding of the present state of affairs and the effectiveness of our adaptations and mitigations, leveraging both data and computation.
However, programming the computer systems required to effectively ingest, clean, collate, process, explore, archive, and derive policy decisions from the planetary data we are collecting is difficult and leads to artefacts presently not usable by non-CS-experts, not reliable enough for scientific and political decision making, and not widely and openly available to all interested parties. Concurrently, domains where computational techniques are already central (e.g., climate modelling) are facing diminishing returns from current hardware trends and software techniques.
PROPL explores how to close the gap between state-of-the-art programming methods being developed in academia and the use of programming in climate analysis, modelling, forecasting, policy, and diplomacy. The aim is to build bridges to the current practices used in the scientific community. -- About PROPL
How to take part
In order to get a wide set of participants, we've got three different ways you can contribute to the program this year, all of which are listed in the call for papers:
- Firstly, we want to hear short "provocations" from practitioners in the field, which outline a problem, application area, challenge, or capacity gap, that might be addressable by computer scientists. Since said practitioners are busy people, we've put together a simple online form in which you can submit your thoughts, rants, and ideas.
- Secondly, we're now going to publish a post-proceedings in the ACM digital library. These can be short papers (up to 5 pages, excluding bibliography/appendices) addressing a topic within the scope of the workshop. LOCOS did a great job encouraging thoughtful submissions last year, and we'd love to see a similar enthusiasm this year too.
- Thirdly, consider submitting a talk or discussion idea aligned with the topics of the workshop. This could include reporting on existing work, a demo, open problems, work in progress, or new ideas and speculation. We may combine multiple talk proposals into panel discussions, depending on the submitted topics.
The papers and talks can be submitted using the PROPL HotCRP, and the provocations via an online form. The deadline is the 3rd July 2025 (anywhere on earth), so we hope to see you take part!
See last year's talks
For those curious about the first PROPL outing, all of the talk videos are all online on YouTube or our EEG video mirror (ad-free).
(Thanks to Lena Yang for spotting typos.)
notes