In the past TPHOLs, and its predecessors, have been hosted alternately in Europe and North America. For 1998, we at The Australian National University suggest a move down under. What follows is our proposal for holding TPHOLs'98 in Australia.
The conference would be held in Canberra, on the campus of The Australian National University (ANU). Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory, offers a wealth of attractions to visitors. Affordable accommodation would be available on campus through one of the many residential colleges of ANU. University House and nearby hotels can provide more up-market accommodation for those who want it. Canberra, like other Australian cities, offers great opportunities for wining and dining. There are many excellent and affordable restaurants here and, for those who fancy spending some time touring vineyards, the area has a number of premium wine producers.
Of course, the seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere, so TPHOLs time is in our spring. We propose late September, when the temperatures typically range from a maximum in the high teens or low twenties to a minium of somewhere around five degrees (Celsius). Skiing is sometimes still possible during this time of year at mountain resorts just a few hours drive from Canberra. But, if you would rather spend some time in the more stereotypical Australian pursuit of sunning yourself on a beach, just get to the coast and head north until you can't stand the temperature any higher. For those who like to visit big cities, Sydney is the nation's number one tourist destination, and it is just 300km away. If wilderness is your thing, just step out of Canberra and it's all around you.
In keeping with the tradition of encouraging student participation in the conference, we will endeavour to keep conference costs to a minimum. We recognise this must be a particular concern for our bid, because of additional travel costs that may be faced by attendees from Europe and North America.
If successful in our bid for TPHOLs'98, we will pursue the following means to reduce the cost of the attending the conference:
Our plan is to schedule the conference during the week Monday 28 September - Friday 2 October 1998. This period allows for the best possible attendance by Australian researchers and the best possibilities for co-location with other conferences, described below. However the previous week, Monday 21 September - Friday 25 September, is also possible. We welcome comments from the TPHOLs community as to which of the two weeks they feel would be more appropriate.
For many attendees, a trip to Australia would be both a rare opportunity, and a major commitment of time and funds. To help enure maximum value in return for this commitment, and thereby encourage attendance, we are examining the possibility of running TPHOLs'98 in conjunction with other workshops in the same general area of interest.
We have identified one very good possibility so far; it is the International Refinement Workshop and Formal Methods Pacific 1998 (IRW/FMP'98). IRW/FMP'98 will be held in Canberra at approximately the same time as we propose to hold TPHOLs'98. Those members of the TPHOLs community who have an interest in program refinement, or a general interest in program correctness and programming language semantics, would doubtless find IRW and FMP 1998 a valuable conference to attend.
In previous years the refereed proceedings of TPHOLs, and its predecessor conferences, have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. We hope to be able to continue that tradition.
We also plan to offer a less formal, unrefereed track at the conference to encourage student and work-in-progress presentations. This material would be recorded in a separate, informal proceedings published as a joint technical report of the Department of Computer Science and the Computer Sciences Laboratory of the ANU.
We propose to run TPHOLs'98 in much the same way as TPHOLs'96 was (and we anticipate TPHOLs'97 will be); that is, we would expect to host the conference over a 4 or 5 day period combining both serious and social activities. The program would consist mainly of refereed paper presentations of around half an hour each. There would also be poster space provided for the presentation of work from the informal track of the conference. Poster presenters would be given a few minutes each in the main program to introduce themselves and their work.
The only substantial change we are suggesting for TPHOLs'98 is to exploit the opportunity presented by co-locating the conference with other meetings of interest to the TPHOLs community. In the past, there has been a significant amount of work submitted to TPHOLs and the refinement workshops that would be of interest to both communities. We would hope that, where possible, we could arrange for work of interest to more than one conference to be presented to a wider audience. This could be achieved either though multiple presentations or, if there were sufficient papers in this category, a joint conference session.