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Call for Contributions
Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software 2018:
Sustainable Communities
http://2018.mloss.org
at NIPS 2018, Montreal, Canada
8 December 2018


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ABSTRACT


Machine learning open source software (MLOSS) is one of the
cornerstones of open science and reproducible research. Once a niche
area for ML research, MLOSS today has gathered significant momentum,
fostered both by scientific community, and more recently by corporate
organizations. The past mloss.org workshops, from NIPS06 to ICML15,
successfully brought together researchers and developers from both
fields, to exchange experiences and lessons learnt, to encourage
interoperability between people and projects, and to demonstrate
software to users in the ML community.

Continuing the tradition in 2018, this year’s workshop that is a mix
of invited speakers (NumFocus, tidyverse, openML, GPFlow), contributed
talks/demos, and discussion/activity sessions. This year’s headline
aims to give an insight of the challenges faced by projects as they
seek long-term sustainability, with a particular focus on community
building and preservation, and diverse teams.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
The organizing committee is currently seeking abstracts for talks and
demos that showcase novel and exciting MLOSS. The workshop is a great
opportunity for you to share use-cases, development, philosophy, or
other activities related to MLOSS. Smaller projects and those without
a significant supporting organization are especially encouraged to
participate for improved outreach and visibility.

Possible topics include (but not exclusively):
Position papers for community growth/transition/diversification
Retrospectives on community/funding/sustainability experiences
Real-world use-cases of MLOSS
Novel or improved ML packages
Meta projects that connect third party projects, e.g. benchmarking,
workflows, wrappers, etc

The committee will select several submitted abstracts for demos and
short talks. All software presentations are required to include a live
demonstration.

Submission format is NIPS18 style pdf (3 pages maximum + references).
All submissions must include pointers to project website/community,
code (GitHub, etc), where applicable. For software submissions, a link
to code is mandatory. Previews of to be presented demos are not
mandatory but will increase the acceptance likelihood. Please submit
your contributions at:
https://openreview.net/group?id=NIPS.cc/2018/Workshop/MLOSS

Please note that there is a separate pool of NIPS tickets for those
who present at workshops. For more details see http://2018.mloss.org

STUDENT PARTICIPANT SUPPORT
We have limited funding to support participant
travelling/accommodation. This support is for students who submit an
abstract only. Apply here: https://goo.gl/forms/8U9N4NXugUH69jKj2

IMPORTANT DATES
* Submission deadline: 30 September 2018
* Notification of acceptance: 12 October 2018
* Workshop date: 8 December 2018 (Sat)


ORGANIZERS:
Heiko Strathmann, UCL / ETH Zürich / shogun.ml
Viktor Gal, ETH Zürich / shogun.ml
Ryan R. Curtin, RelationalAI / mlpack
Sergey Lisitsyn, Yandex / shogun.ml
Antti Honkela, University of Helsinki
Cheng Soon Ong, Data61 CSIRO