Synopsis of the ASPLOS '16 Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) Invited-Speakers Session

Abstract

The Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) session is a longstanding tradition at ASPLOS, soliciting talks that consist of forward-looking, visionary, inspiring, creative, far out or just plain amazing ideas presented in an exciting way. (Amusing elements in the presentations are tolerated ;-) but are in fact optional.) The first WACI session took place in 1998. Back then, the call for talks included a problem statement, which contended that usually do not get admitted to [such conferences as] ISCA or ASPLOS unless the systems that they describe are mature enough to run [some standard benchmark suites, which] has a chilling effect on the idea generation process---encouraging incremental research [1]. The 1998 WACI session turned out to be a great success. Its webpage states that were 42 submissions [competing over] only eight time slots, [which resulted in] this session [having] a lower acceptance rate than the conference itself [2]. But the times they are a-changin' [3], and the WACI session no longer enjoys that many submissions (Figure 1), perhaps because nowadays there exist many forums for researchers to describe/discuss their preliminary ideas, including: the ``hot topics in'' workshops [4--7]; a journal like CAL, dedicated to early results [8]; main conferences soliciting short submissions describing ``original or unconventional ideas at a preliminary stage'' in addition to regular papers [9]; and the many workshops co-located with main conferences, like ISCA '15, which hosted thirteen such workshops [10]. Regardless of the reason for the declining number of submissions, this time we've decided to organize the WACI session differently to ensure its continued high quality. Instead of soliciting talks via an open call and hoping for the best, we proactively invited speakers whom we believe are capable of delivering excellent WACI presentations. That is, this year's WACI session consists exclusively of invited speakers. Filling up the available slots turned out to be fairly easy, as most of the researchers we invited promptly accepted our invitation. The duration of each talk was set to be eight minutes (exactly as in the first WACI session from 1998) plus two minutes for questions. The talks are outlined below. We believe they are interesting and exciting, and we hope the attendees of the session will find them stimulating and insightful.