Program Co-Chair of the 1st International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2008)

We are grateful to the MODELS organizers, Springer Verlag, the sponsors of), the Program Committee and reviewers of SLE 2008, The response to the call for papers for the first edition of the SLE conference was overwhelming, and it was significantly over the number we initially expected. We received 106 abstract submissions out of which we got 90 full completed submissions; from those, the program committee selected 18 papers: 16 full papers, 1 short paper, and 1 tool demonstration. The full conference program including all papers and abstracts along with the details of both keynotes are attached to this report. I am a co-editor of the abstract reader, which is available at http://www.informatik.uni-mainz.de/Dateien/sle2008.pdf and published by the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in its Mainzer Informatik-Berichte series. Currently, we are working on the compilation of the conference’s postproceedings that will be printed by Springer in their Lecture Notes of Computer Science series. The submission due of camera ready papers for the postproceedings is November 1, 2008, while we expect the completed publication of the post-proceedings in early 2009. Together with Prof. Eric Van Wyk and Prof. Ralf Laemmel, I am going to be an editor of the postproceedings book. Due to the very high quality of the selected and presented papers, we are also considering the compilation of a special issue in an international journal. We were also able to attract four industrial sponsors: Ateji, CapGemini, Oboe Model Driven Company, and Software Improvement Group. The resulting program covered nearly all of the diverse topics in software language engineering. That is, the selected papers cover engineering aspects in many phases of the software language development life cycle. These include the analysis of languages in the design phase, and their actual usage after deployment as well as various tools and techniques used in language implementations including different approaches to language transformation and composition. The conference program was scheduled to provide ample time for the interesting discussion that we expect the papers and keynotes to trigger. This was especially appreciated by the participants of the conference, as they appreciated very much an opportunity to participate in very interactive discussions during the whole conference. Yet, given that this is a brand new conference, I we perceived a need to further work on the better interlinking across the overall SLE community, so that we can build a better common understanding and shared vocabulary. Therefore, we will invite “tutorial” papers for the next instance of the conference. The Steering Committee of the conference has appointed me to be the general conference of the next edition of the conference – 2nd International Conference on Software Language Engineering. We were already able to negotiate that the conference will be collocated to the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering of Systems and Languages and will be held in Denver, Colorado, USA in early October, 2009. Together with the program committee co-chairs Prof. Mark van den Brand and Prof. Jeff Gray, I have already started an intensive preparation for the next year’s conference. This already included the development of the conference’s web site (http://www.planet-sl.org/sle2009), invitation of keynotes, preparation of the call for papers and publicity strategy.I am one of the initiators of the International Conference on Software Language Engineering. I am serving on the steering committee of the conference along with several well-known researchers in the area of software engineering, including, * Mark van den Brand, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands * James Cordy, Queen's University, Canada * Jean-Marie Favre, University of Grenoble, France * Dragan Gašević, Athabasca University, Canada * Görel Hedin, Lund University, Sweden * Ralf Lämmel, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany * Eric Van Wyk, University of Minnesota, USA * Andreas Winter, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany Dr. Eric Van Wyk and I are appointed by the steering committee to be the program co-chairs of the first instance of the conference. Thus, our role is to put together the conference's research program, including, defining the scope of the conference; writing and distributing the call for papers; building the international program committee; organizing the peer-review process of the submitted papers (July 14-August 25, 2008); making selection of the submitted papers, panel proposals, and demonstrations; creating the final conference program (August 25-September 10, 2008); inviting the keynote speakers; selecting the best conference papers; editing the conference proceedings (Springer's LNCS volume); making sure that the conference program is followed; opening and closing the conference. Later on, organizing and editing a special issue in a well-known international journal (currently, we are negotiating the arrangements with the prestigious the Science of Computer Programming journal published by Elsevier). In addition, given the SLE 2008 conference is co-located with the MODELS 2008 conference, I also plan to attend the MODELS conference. With my students, I have already submitted a paper “Model Driven Engineering of Policy-Based Service Oriented Architecture” to the main program of MODELS 2008. For this paper, we expect to receive the review of the submitted paper on July 4th, 2008. In addition, at this conference, I organize the 1st International Workshop on Non-functional System Properties in Domain Specific Modeling Languages (NFPinDSML2008): http://planet-mde.org/nfpindsml, and as chair I am expected to attend. The workshop has been approved by the MODELS 2008 conference organizers. Furthermore, given the rich workshop program of the MODELS 2008 conference, that directly fits into my research agenda, with my graduate students, I plant to submit at least one workshop papers. The submission dues for the workshops are in mid 2008.Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF