ACCU Conference News

ACCU conferences tend to have themes. Not for the content of the sessions of the conference, obviously – content is determined entirely by the Programme Committee selecting from that that is submitted^[1]. The conference themes are for the more social aspect of the conference. In particular, the conference dinner/supper (choose your preferred label here) on the Friday evening, and the t-shirts, and other bits and bobs.

For reasons that are likely to become very apparent at 2017-04-26T09:31 in the Bristol Suite, we are thinking of "rock music"^[2] or something along those lines as a theme for ACCU 2017. As is traditional we are having a competition to allow people to design the conference t-shirt based on the chosen theme.

So if you fancy having a go at designing the ACCU 2017 t-shirt on the theme of "rock music" send your mock up images to ACCUConf Chair. We are not entirely sure of the closing date just now, but we are sure there is one. Also we are sure there is a prize, but we are not entirely sure what that is just at the minute^[3].

It appears that we put the Bloomberg logo in our sponsors logo area but failed to announce in this blog that Bloomberg had signed up as a sponsor of ACCU 2017. Very remiss. So a little later than it should have been: we are very pleased to announce that Bloomberg is a sponsor of the ACCU 2017 conference.

ACCU is a four-day conference, but it also has a day of full-day pre-conference workshops. For ACCU 2017, we have, on Tuesday 2017-04-25, four workshops for you to choose from. In no particular order (*):

All four of these workshops really are "must attend" workshops. However don’t dither, plump for one and sign up – today. Click through REGISTER FOR ACCU 2017 HERE to register, and sign up for your chosen workshop.

(*) Well actually there is an order, but it is left as an exercise for the reader to discern it.

The splendid people at Archer-Yates, who partner ACCU in putting on ACCUConf, and who handle all the organising and finances, have a little micro-website for handling registration for the conference. It makes legal and financial, as well as organisational, sense to have the registration site separate from this one, even though, at first sight, it may seem awkward. The really important thing though is that they have "opened for business": registration for ACCU 2017 is now open!

So take a leap via the big orange button saying REGISTER FOR ACCU 2017 HERE, sign in, register, secure your place now.

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.