May 27, 2008

ELS'08 Report

Last week, the 1st European Lisp Symposium took place in Bordeaux, France. It was a very successful event, with some excellent paper presentations, but also more interactive formats. For example, we tried out the writers' workshop format for what we called a "work-in-progress" track, which was pretty well received by the participating authors. It's a format that focuses on improving the quality of papers that are not yet ready for publication. I'm very optimistic that we will see the results of this track at future Lisp events. We also organized "birds of a feather" sessions on various topics (distributed programming, image processing, CLIM and better system definition facilities), which were also very well received by the participants. It is my hope that future Lisp events will have more of these interactive formats.

The symposium itself went very smoothly, which was primarily due to the excellent local organization by Antoine Allombert, Marie Beurton-Aimar, Irène Durand, Nicole Lun and Robert Strandh. Without their willingness to organize the event and without the energy they put into it, the symposium would have never taken place. So a big thank you to all of them!

It was our intention to organize the European Lisp Symposium as an annual event right from the start. So the preparations for next year's ELS have already started, which will take place in Milan in 2009, at around the same time of the year (ca. end of May), and will be organized by Marco Antoniotti and António Leitão. More news will follow on the usual channels, but you can already start to prepare your ideas for ELS 2009!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed ELS'08 ! It was full of interesting people -many of them astonishingly brilliant, and all talks caught my attention, which happens rarely in bigger conferences. The organisation was superb, and French food was delicious. I am looking forward to ELS'09 :-)