Programming for the Planet (PROPL)PROPL 2024

There are simultaneous crises across the planet due to rising CO₂ emissions, rapid biodiversity loss, and desertification. Assessing progress on these complex and interlocking issues requires a global view on the effectiveness of our adaptations and mitigations. To succeed in the coming decades, we need a wealth of new data about our natural environment that we rapidly process into accurate indicators, with sufficient trust in the resulting insights to make decisions that affect the lives of billions of people worldwide.

However, programming the computer systems required to effectively ingest, clean, collate, process, explore, archive, and derive policy decisions from the planetary data we are collecting is difficult and leads to artefacts presently not usable by non-CS-experts, not reliable enough for scientific and political decision making, and not widely and openly available to all interested parties. Concurrently, domains where computational techniques are already central (e.g., climate modelling) are facing diminishing returns from current hardware trends and software techniques.

PROPL explores how to close the gap between state-of-the-art programming methods being developed in academia and the use of programming in climate analysis, modelling, forecasting, policy, and diplomacy. The aim is to build bridges to the current practices used in the scientific community.

The first edition of this workshop will comprise:

• invited talks
• contributed talks (selected by the programme committee based on short abstracts)
• "working workshop brainstorming’’ format.

Frequently Asked Questions

1) What is expected of a discussant in terms of participation on the day of the workshop, and subsequently?

We will match up discussants with the climate practitioner speakers a few weeks ahead of the workshop, so that you can choose to talk to them ahead of the workshop (time permitting) and familiarise yourself with their particular topic. The workshop day itself is a good opportunity to spend some more time with the speaker (perhaps at lunch or over the breaks) and take notes on what you think the PL relevance is. Once the workshop is done, the co-chairs will drive the assembly of the paper output, and would be grateful for any inputs the discussants all have. We have no preconceived notion of how much group involvement there will be here, as this is the first time we are running this format, but we imagine that there will be a spread of involvements from the discussants. At a minimum, just getting your notes from the day to the chairs will be more than enough to discharge your obligations.

If in doubt, please do put in a brief application to the HotCRP with your interests and area of expertise! Just submit a note to the PROPL HotCRP with under the “discussant” category with your name as the title, and a brief covering note in the abstract field.

2) Do you have any examples of existing cases where PL techniques have helped climate research?

• Patrik Jansson has put together a PhD reading course on Functional Programming and Climate Impact Research from the past decade. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but covers a spectrum of approaches.
• The recent book on Computing the Climate (Steve Easterbrook, 2023) is excellent background reading on computation climate modelling and some of the challenges therein.
• The ICFP 2023 keynote on “Functional Programming for the Planet” by Anil contains pointers to FP approaches.
• The Topos Institute Colloquium talk “Programming for the Planet” by Dominic contains some other points to language approaches.
• If you have others, then please contact the co-chairs (Dominic Orchard and Anil Madhavapeddy) and we will add them to this list!

3) How do we get the word out to climate practitioners?

The POPL/SIGPLAN community is obviously tailored towards programming language researchers, and so we will need to tap into our networks to invite practitioners who are external to this community. In this regard, we intend to be as expansive and inclusive as possible with what is in scope, so please do feel free to contact people that you know and encourage them to submit a short abstract(even a few paragraphs with pointers to existing work). In the event that the immediate workshop is oversubscribed, the co-chairs will figure out a followup. There is also no expectation of seniority for practitioners – talk proposals from students working in the climate space are as welcome as any other!

4) Will there be other such workshops in the future?

The format being proposed here seems to have captured the interest of other disciplines in computer science. While we certainly hope there will be, any future plans obviously depend on the participation of people for this first one. So if you are interested in the climate space, and wish to take part, then please consider nominating yourself as a discussant. And similarly, if you have heard of interesting climate research that you wish to hear more of, the encourage them to submit a draft!

5) Is remote attendance possible at the workshop?

Absolutely. We will make sure there is a hybrid streaming setup during the day, and for a breakout Zoom during breaks to attempt to get a virtual hallway track going. And because POPL is right in the middle of London in January, we hope for good in-person attendance for those who don’t mind taking a train across Europe…

Call for Papers

PROPL (propl.dev) explores how to close the gap between state-of-the-art programming methods being developed in academia and the use of programming in climate analysis, modelling, forecasting, policy, and diplomacy. The aim is to build bridges to the current practices used in the scientific community.

The first edition of this workshop will comprise:

• invited talks from practitioners in the environmental/climate sciences
• contributed talks (selected by the programme committee based on short abstracts)
• “working workshop brainstorming” format

We would welcome contributions in the following forms:

• Talk proposal: Please submit an abstract of a talk aligned with the topics of the workshop. This could include reporting on existing work, a demo, open problems, work in progress, or new ideas and speculation.
• Proposed discussion: If you would like to propose a discussion/brainstorming session on a particular topic, e.g., in a hour slot, then please submit a description of the session, at least three questions to consider, and at least two possible participants who could lead the discussion.
• Discussant: Please outline an area of expertise aligned with the workshop in which you would be willing to act as a discussant, i.e., provide detailed commentary on talks given within this topic. We hope that after the workshop, discussants will work with the chairs to distill down a broader article that lays out a roadmap for programming language research and climate action.