WACAS 2014: Call for Papers

Workshop on Approximate Computing Across the System Stack (WACAS) 2014
Co-located with ASPLOS 2014 — March 2, 2014 — Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

With transistor scaling becoming less effective at improving computer system performance and energy efficiency, we urgently need options that provide a path forward for the IT industry. Trading off accuracy for better performance and energy efficiency is an attractive option for many important and resource-hungry applications, including image and video processing, computer vision, machine learning, simulations, big data analytics, embedded systems, etc. For that reason, approximate computing is quickly becoming a “hot topic,” with active research in computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems and user-facing areas such as ubiquitous computing and HCI.

Making approximate computing successful requires cooperation among all layers of the stack, from algorithms to programming languages to OSes to architecture to circuits, as well as system components like storage and networks. This workshop aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to present and discuss thoughts and ideas on how to effectively exploit approximate computing.

The organizers are aiming for a mix of invited talks, debate, panels and peer-reviewed papers. Peer-reviewed papers will not be published in a proceedings, so submitting to WACAS will not preclude future publication opportunities. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Hardware support for approximate computing
• Programming languages and compiler support for approximate computing
• Tools for writing, debugging, and testing approximate programs
• Modeling and understanding approximate computing opportunities and systems
• Applications amenable to approximation
• Reflections on past work on approximate computing
• Position papers on approximate computing, potential, how it would fail, what we need to succeed, etc.

Prospective authors of research papers should aim for 6 pages including references. Position papers and short notes should aim for 2 pages. Use the formatting guidelines from the main conference. Submissions may optionally be blind: authors can choose whether to include their names.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: January 20, 2014 (extended)
• Author notification: January 31, 2014
• Camera-ready submission: February 20, 2014
• Workshop: Sunday, March 2, 2014

Organization

Program committee:

• Saman Amarasinghe, MIT
• Todd Austin, University of Michigan
• Luis Ceze, University of Washington
• Shidhartha Das, ARM
• Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, Georgia Tech
• Dan Grossman, University of Washington
• Hank Hoffmann, University of Chicago
• Rakesh Kumar, UIUC
• Scott Mahlke, University of Michigan
• Mark Oskin, University of Washington
• Krishna Palem, Rice University
• Ben Ransford, University of Washington
• Adrian Sampson, University of Washington

Contact the organizers with questions.