We are pleased to announce a new conference in the Julia sphere, SciMLCon, focused on celebrating the advancements and applications of the SciML Open Source Software ecosystem. With that, the SciMLCon 2022 Call for Proposals (CfP) is now open!
SciMLCon 2022 will be a virtual conference which will take place on Wednesday March 23rd, 2022. The conference will be a live stream with speakers from around the world. The CFP closes January 31st, 2022.
Thoughts and Vision for SciMLCon and Beyond
As this is a new conference, I want to take a second to share the vision of where we are going. I served as the Chair of the Programs Committee for JuliaCon 2019 and 2020, and guided 2021. We all know that we have seen exponential growth in the Julia community during this timeframe, but many may not realize how this has effected the logistics and culture of the conference. Most of these changes have been positive, with a booming audience cheering everyone on, but this of course had the insidious side effect that either we required more days of the conference (not logistically possible), more concurrent tracks (i.e. less people have a shared experience), or a lower acceptance rate. Because of this, acceptance rates for talks have dropped closer to Harvard or NeurIPS acceptance rates than one might expect, requiring more talks to change into lightning talks to keep the culture of the conference as about sharing and not academic prestige and competition.
Given the 23 talks + workshops which were directly SciML related at JuliaCon 2021, we realized that it was time to start an offshoot conference on the 6 month offseason to burden the load of JuliaCon. Besides, aren’t we all just begging for more content every February anyways? Thus SciML had included starting SciMLCon as part of the CZI grant which we had received, and here we are. SciML is thus the second Julia organization to start a regular conference circuit (the first of course being jump-dev).
However, our vision is for much more than just SciML. We purposely plan to parallel the infrastructure of JuliaCon in order to establish a model for Julia ecosystem offshoot conferences. With the rate at which our community is expanding, we will soon be able to support a JuliaDataCon, JuliaGPUCon, FluxMLCon, and beyond. Think a system like PyData where every group can drag and drop and get a Julia conference running. The CFP system is ready to be swapped out for a new name, drop some text in a website, change the template background for a stream, and we’re good to go. If you are interested in helping build out this organization, please get in touch.