Workshop on Negative Outcomes, Post-mortems, and Experiences

Workshop on Negative Outcomes, Post-mortems, and Experiences (NOPE)
in conjunction with MICRO 2017
Cambridge, USA
October 14, 2017

IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper submission: September 27, 2017
Author notification: September 29, 2017
Camera-ready version: October 7, 2017

Not all research projects end up with positive results. Sometimes ideas that sound enticing at first run into unexpected complexity, high overheads, or turn out simply infeasible. Such projects often end up in a proverbial researcher’s drawer, and the community as a whole is not aware of dead-end or hard-to-advance research directions. NOPE is a venue that encourages publishing such results in all their “badness”.

The best negative results help us learn from our mistakes. They can illuminate hidden obstacles or demonstrate why we need a change of course. An ideal submission to NOPE has a novel idea which sounds plausible from first principles or design intuition, but yields little to no improvement (in performance, power, area, …) in practice. The paper drills down into the reasons for the lack of improvement and proposes a plausible explanation – different technology trends, unexpected implementation complexity.

Our goal is to find papers which the community can learn from and might otherwise have trouble finding a suitable venue, so we take a broad view of what constitutes a “negative” result. A good NOPE submission might entail:
– Thorough evaluations of failed projects which uncover and characterize the root cause.
– Papers which describe both positive and negative results, with an emphasis on the underlying reasons behind why some succeeded and other failed.
– Cradle-to-grave examination of completed projects, specifically to dissect dead-ends and unworkable solutions encountered along the way.
– Design space explorations or comprehensive experiments which suggest a particular technique is unlikely to work under a realistic set of assumptions.
– Research which uncovers fundamental limitations in scalability, performance, accuracy, or other quantifiable metrics.
– Any research which serves to share the lessons of failure to the broader community, such that we can avoid repeating them in the future.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We believe in substance over style, and we encourage authors to prioritize delivering their message over conforming to a particular template. That being said, we anticipate papers will probably end up in the 4–6 page range, and we encourage authors to use a two-column format. Papers need not be anonymized.

Additionally, we ask that you also include a short, 1-paragraph abstract in your submission email. This should be suitable for inclusion on the NOPE website and program handouts.

Finally, while one of the goals of NOPE is to find a home for papers that can sometimes be difficult to publish elsewhere, we do not wish to preclude publication elsewhere. NOPE 2017 will not be indexed with IEEE or ACM, so authors should feel free to expand and submit their work to larger venues. We discourage resubmission of previously published papers, though “second-look” papers or retrospectives fall squarely within the scope of the workshop and are welcomed.

Submit your papers via email to: submissions@nope.pub by 11:59pm (anywhere on Earth) on the deadline.

ORGANIZERS:
David Brooks, Harvard
Brandon Reagen, Harvard
Bob Adolf, Harvard
Svilen Kanev, Google

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Chris Batten, Cornell
Luis Ceze, University of Washington
Tipp Moseley, Google
Thomas Wenisch, University of Michigan