SIGSEGV '19: The 4th Conference on Silly and Egregious Violations of Common Sense
May 4, 2019, Gates Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, Earth, Sol System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe

Overview

The 4th Conference on Silly and Egregious Violations of Common Sense seeks to present exciting, entertaining, probably original research related to the practice of computer science without the limitations of common sense. Our goal is to bring together researchers from across the fields of computer and information science who have unconventional or nonsensical ideas that might not be accepted to other technical conferences. SIGSEGV '19 will provide a high-baud-rate forum for presenting and discussing results, non-results, and half-baked ideas that further the expansion of the field of computing beyond its traditional boundaries of sanity.

We solicit papers describing original and hopefully unpublished research including contributions to the area of nonsensical computer science. Striving for respectability and observing basic common sense has traditionally limited the scope of computer science research, so our conference accepts submissions from a wide range of topics. Subjects of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Design and implementation of needlessly complex systems
  • Structural operational semantics of construction equipment
  • Highly unavailable distributed systems
  • Ubiquitous, inescapable, and all-encompassing computing
  • Artificial stupidity, shallow learning, and natural intelligence
  • Perplexity theory results and applications
  • Formal semantics of formal semantics
  • Language-based insecurity
  • Computational xenobiology
  • Category theory and practice
  • Incomprehensibly esoteric mathematics
  • Thaughmaturgy and black magic for performance optimization
  • Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken

Since SIGSEGV is a minimally selective conference, papers should report reasonably novel results in a manner most likely to entertain the program committee. Submissions will be judged on originality, clarity, irreverence, humor, and likelihood of being rejected from mainstream scientific conferences. All accepted papers will be made available online one week after the conference, which will facilitate research discussion among members of the community with time travel devices. Submissions will be done electronically via the HotCRP system linked below.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be submitted in PDF format through the official online submission system. SIGSEGV is single-blind, so authors may include their names on paper submissions and should not obscure references to their previous work.

Formatting rules

  • Submitted papers may have at most 10 pages of technical content, including text, figures, appendices, prependices, appendages, attached source code, random cat pictures, etc. The page size must be 8.5"x11", and text must be a reasonable size that is easily readable without a magnifying glass.
  • In addition to the 10 pages allowed for technical content, a submission may include any number of additional pages of bibliographic references.
  • Any typeface is allowed for text, except for Comic Sans because everyone hates it. The paper review committee encourages the use of creative and interesting fonts, since they normally have to spend all day reading walls of text printed in Computer Modern.
  • Submissions must be typeset using LaTeX in order to ensure the conference is taken seriously. Papers written using consumer word-processing software such as Microsoft Word will be rejected without review.
  • Pages should not be numbered, so that submitted PDFs can easily be amalgamated into a conference proceedings document without bothering to recompile them.
  • Using color to enhance graphs and figures is encouraged, since everyone has a color printer these days. Bonus points are awarded if the meaning of the paper would change significantly if printed in grayscale.
  • Symbols and labels used in the graphs should be readable as printed, and not only with a 20x on-screen magnification.
  • Try to limit the file size to less than 15 MB.

SIGSEGV Policies

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, and plagiarism of other authors is usually considered unacceptable. However, SIGSEGV allows submissions that have been simultaneously or previously published in other conferences, as long as the other conference is not SIGBOVIK. Such papers will probably have reduced chances of acceptance, given that SIGSEGV seeks to promote work that would normally be unpublishable, but sufficiently unorthodox work will still be considered because we really need more submissions.

Plagiarism is still prohibited and will result in extreme disciplinary action being taken against the perpetrator. Even we have standards.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms, end-user license agreements, or any other wall of text filled with legal jargon will not be considered. All submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the SIGSEGV web site; rejected submissions will be permanently destroyed and cease to exist, so their confidentiality is a non-issue.

Paper submission link

Like all Serious Conferences, SIGSEGV uses the HotCRP (pronounced “Hot Crap!”) system for paper submission and review. You can submit your papers online here.

If the link appears broken, but the rest of this website is up, it may be the result of uncontrolled spacetime fluctuations or SPARCs in the Linux kernel. Sacrifice a goat to Richard Stallman and try again later.