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Synopsis of the ASPLOS '16 Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) Invited-Speakers Session

Published:25 March 2016Publication History
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Abstract

The Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) session is a longstanding tradition at ASPLOS, soliciting talks that consist of forward-looking, visionary, inspiring, creative, far out or just plain amazing ideas presented in an exciting way. (Amusing elements in the presentations are tolerated ;-) but are in fact optional.)

The first WACI session took place in 1998. Back then, the call for talks included a problem statement, which contended that "papers usually do not get admitted to [such conferences as] ISCA or ASPLOS unless the systems that they describe are mature enough to run [some standard benchmark suites, which] has a chilling effect on the idea generation process---encouraging incremental research" [1]. The 1998 WACI session turned out to be a great success. Its webpage states that "there were 42 submissions [competing over] only eight time slots, [which resulted in] this session [having] a lower acceptance rate than the conference itself" [2].

But the times they are a-changin' [3], and the WACI session no longer enjoys that many submissions (Figure 1), perhaps because nowadays there exist many forums for researchers to describe/discuss their preliminary ideas, including: the ``hot topics in'' workshops [4--7]; a journal like CAL, dedicated to early results [8]; main conferences soliciting short submissions describing ``original or unconventional ideas at a preliminary stage'' in addition to regular papers [9]; and the many workshops co-located with main conferences, like ISCA '15, which hosted thirteen such workshops [10].

Regardless of the reason for the declining number of submissions, this time we've decided to organize the WACI session differently to ensure its continued high quality. Instead of soliciting talks via an open call and hoping for the best, we proactively invited speakers whom we believe are capable of delivering excellent WACI presentations. That is, this year's WACI session consists exclusively of invited speakers. Filling up the available slots turned out to be fairly easy, as most of the researchers we invited promptly accepted our invitation. The duration of each talk was set to be eight minutes (exactly as in the first WACI session from 1998) plus two minutes for questions.

The talks are outlined below. We believe they are interesting and exciting, and we hope the attendees of the session will find them stimulating and insightful.

References

  1. John Kubiatowicz. The ASPLOS '98 wild and crazy ideas session: Call for talks. URL http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/kubitron/asplos98/call.html, 1998. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. John Kubiatowicz. The ASPLOS '98 wild and crazy ideas session. URL http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/kubitron/asplos98/index.html, 1998. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Bob Dylan. The times they are a-changin'. URL http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/times-they-are-changin, 1964. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. HotCloud '16: USENIX workshop on hot topics in cloud computing. URL https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud16, 2016. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. HotStorage '16: USENIX workshop on hot topics in storage and file systems. URL https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotstorage16, 2016. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. HotOS '15: USENIX workshop on hot topics in operating systems. URL https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15, 2015. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. HotSec '16: USENIX summit on hot topics in security. URL https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotsec16, 2016. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. CAL: IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. URL http://www.computer.org/web/cal/about. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Call for papers of ATC '16: USENIX Annual Technical Conference. URL https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/call-for-papers, 2016. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Workshops of ISCA '15: ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture. URL http://www.ece.cmu.edu/calcm/isca2015/workshop_tutorial.php, 2015. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Steve Keckler, Steve Blackburn, and Emmett Witchel. The Wild and Crazy Idea Session IV. URL http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/skeckler/wild04/, 2004. Accessed: January 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova. 2012 WACI (provocative ideas) session. Private email correspondence, 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. John Criswell. 2015 WACI session. Private email correspondence, 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

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  1. Synopsis of the ASPLOS '16 Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) Invited-Speakers Session

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
          ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 51, Issue 4
          ASPLOS '16
          April 2016
          774 pages
          ISSN:0362-1340
          EISSN:1558-1160
          DOI:10.1145/2954679
          • Editor:
          • Andy Gill
          Issue’s Table of Contents
          • cover image ACM Conferences
            ASPLOS '16: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
            March 2016
            824 pages
            ISBN:9781450340915
            DOI:10.1145/2872362
            • General Chair:
            • Tom Conte,
            • Program Chair:
            • Yuanyuan Zhou

          Copyright © 2016 Owner/Author

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 25 March 2016

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