22 December 2016
The core of any conference based on submitted proposals are the submitted proposals, and we got an excellent collection of proposals this year. We think we are going to have an excellent conference based on these.
Conferences are though enhanced dramatically by having good keynote speakers, to set scenes, get questions being asked, open attenders eyes to new things, etc. We believe the ACCU 2017 keynote speakers are going to do this "in spades".
The conference will open on Wednesday with a presentation by Russ Miles supported by his colleagues Gibson and Bot. He will be telling us about microservices hell, and I suspect he will pull the Rug out from under it.
Thursday morning we have a presentation by Brad Chamberlain about how concurrency and parallelism, both local and in clusters, can be first class citizens in programming languages, e.g. Chapel, unlike in all the languages we currently use, e.g. C, C++, Java, etc.
Friday morning we will challenged by Fran Buontempo to decide what intelligence actually is, and indeed whether humans, let alone machines, display it.
As with previous ACCU conferences the first three days start with a keynote, but the last day ends with a keynote. This year we are delighted to have Herb Sutter return to ACCU. He will be telling us something new, but as no-one is entirely sure (not even Herb) what that will be, we are all left on tenterhooks. We can be certain though, that it will be a seriously great close to the conference.
The organising team is already excited, not just about Christmas 2016, but also about ACCU 2017. See you in Bristol, 2017-04-25.