Call for Proposals

The 22nd annual SciPy conference will be held at the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center in Austin, TX July 10-16, 2023. The conference brings together participants from industry, academia, and government to showcase their latest projects, learn from skilled users and developers, and collaborate on code development. The full program will consist of 2 days of tutorials (July 10-11), 3 days of general conference (July 12-14), and 2 days of developer sprints (July 15-16).

Submissions closed on March 1, 2023.

Important Dates

February 22 | Proposal submission deadline

March 1 | Extended submission deadline

April 14 | Speaker notifications sent

April 27 | Conference Schedule Announced

July 10-11 | SciPy 2023 Tutorials

July 12-14 | SciPy 2023 General Conference

Highlighted Tracks

This year we are happy to announce two highlighted tracks that run in parallel to the general conference track:

Machine Learning, Data Science, and Ethics in AI

This track focuses on how theory, tools, and methods in data science and machine learning can be applied to enable scientific progress. This includes the development and application of new open source tools and techniques, as well as novel discoveries in any field made by applying new and existing tools. Given the potentially large societal impact of these technologies, we also encourage proposals that focus on, incorporate, or critique ethical considerations that may arise with their widespread use in science and industry. This track will bring together developers, practitioners, scientists, social scientists, and ethics researchers to discuss machine learning, data science, ethics, and AI.

Tending Your Open Source Garden: Maintenance and Community

The scientific Python stack is developed, maintained, and used by millions of practitioners across all domains in industry, academia, the government, and beyond. Many of the tools that we use day-to-day are maintained by a much smaller group of individuals, and while unbeknownst to many, we rely on their continued efforts for our science. What does this mean for the sustainability of the scientific Python stack and the continued reproducibility of our work? How do we make it more robust? How do we recognize and reward current stewards and pass down commit rights and accolades to future generations? What does the scientific Python community look like and how do we build it in a way that is inclusive to all? What is community building and how do we do it? This track will bring together users, maintainers, community managers, developers, and contributors to the scientific Python ecosystem to address these questions and share their perspectives on both the technical and social aspects of these questions.

Conference Tracks

  • Bioinformatics, Computational Biology & Neuroscience

  • Earth, Ocean, Geo, and Atmospheric 

  • Astronomy and Physics

  • Social Science and the Digital Humanities

  • Materials and Chemistry

  • SciPy Tools

  • General

Does your tool apply to a broad audience? Do you not see any other tracks that are thematically appropriate for your talk? Do you want to talk about lots of tools spanning many domains? Submit your proposal to the General track!

Planning for your proposal submission?

 Proposals must be submitted by March 1, 2023. Here's what you'll need for a submission:

Abstract
Your Abstract will appear in the online schedule and give attendees a sense of your talk. This should be around 100 words or less.

Description
Your placement in the program will be based on reviews of your description. This should be a roughly 500-word outline of your presentation. This outline should concisely describe software of interest to the SciPy community, tools or techniques for more effective computing, or how scientific Python was applied to solve a research problem. A traditional background/motivation, methods, results, and conclusion structure is encouraged but not required. Links to project websites, source code repositories, figures, full papers, and evidence of public speaking ability are encouraged.

You must choose whether to submit as a talk or a poster. Talks that are not selected will automatically be considered for a poster slot. The form allows you to upload a paper. This is optional. You do not need to upload a paper in order to submit a talk or poster.

Tips for Submitting a Proposal

The SciPy Conference is in awe of the work that is being done in the community. We receive many interesting and thought-provoking proposals but we have a limited number of spaces. Please take a look at our tips below to improve your chances of having a talk or poster accepted by the conference. In the unfortunate event that your proposal is not accepted, please keep in mind that you are welcome to give a lightning talk, book a room for a Birds of a Feather discussion, or talk to the Program Committee about displaying your work as a poster in lieu of a talk.

  • Submit your proposal early.

  • In your abstract, be sure to include answers to some basic questions:

    • Who is the intended audience for your talk?

    • What, specifically, will attendees learn from your talk?

  • Ensure that your talk will be relevant to a broad range of people. If your talk is on a particular Python package or piece of software, it should useful to more than a niche group.

  • Include links to source code, articles, blog posts, or other writing that adds context to the presentation.

  • If you've given a talk, tutorial, or other presentation before, include that information as well as a link to slides or a video if they're available.

  • SciPy talks are 25 minutes with 2-3 minutes for questions. Please keep the length of time in mind as you structure your outline.

  • Your talk should not be a commercial for your company’s product. However, you are welcome to talk about how your company solved a problem, or notable open-source projects that may benefit attendees.

Many of these tips are adapted from the PyCon Proposal Resources. Thanks PSF!

How proposals are reviewed and selected

For those of you new to the SciPy community, we wanted to demystify the process we use to select talks and posters. The talks, posters and tutorials go through a similar process consisting of open reviews (i.e., the identities of the submitter and the reviewers are public).  
Submissions are automatically assigned to reviewers with expertise in the domain specific topic. Each submission is reviewed by 3 reviewers and rated in the following categories: 

  • Would you recommend accepting this proposal (yes/no)?

  • Proposal rating? (numerical score 1 to 5)

  • How confident are you in your review? (numerical score 1 to 5)

  • Does this abstract concisely describe software of interest to the SciPy community, tools or techniques for more effective computing, or how scientific Python was applied to solve a research problem? (numerical score 1 to 5)

The submissions and their reviews are provided to the Track or Mini-Symposia Chair. The Program Committee Co-Chairs fill this role for the general track. The Chairs review the abstracts, scores and comments for all the submissions and make recommendations to the Program Committee Co-Chairs. The Program Committee Co-Chairs take the recommendations and build the initial SciPy schedule.

Those that submitted talks or posters that are selected are contacted by the Committee and they are asked to confirm their attendance at the SciPy Conference. The Program Committee works with the Mini-Symposia and Track chairs to identify a second tier of talks that will be added to the schedule in the event that some of the initial selections are not able to attend.

The Tutorial Co-Chairs review the scores and comments for all tutorials and build the schedule. They consider the scores as well as balancing the level of the tutorials (beginner, intermediate, advanced) and striving for a broad mix of topics.

If you have questions about the process, feel free to reach out to the Program Committee Co-Chairs at [email protected].

Proceedings

The Proceedings Submission

Once your talk is accepted, presenters have the option to submit up to an 8 page paper by May 26 for the SciPy2023 Proceedings. The paper should follow the same guidelines as the abstract/description but elaborate on the details to help thoroughly understand the material.

As in previous years, these papers will be reviewed using an open dialog that takes place on github - pull requests over in the proceedings repo https://github.com/scipy-conference/scipy_proceedings.

By submitting a paper to the SciPy Proceedings, you are consenting to having your paper published and assigned a DOI. Even if you aren't going to write a paper, please consider volunteering to help review!

Talk & Poster Presentations

Tutorials

Topics

Tutorials should be focused on covering a well-defined topic in a hands-on manner. We want to see attendees coding! We encourage submissions to be designed to allow at least 50% of the time for hands-on exercises even if this means the subject matter needs to be limited. Tutorials will be 4 hours in duration. In your tutorial application, you can indicate what prerequisite skills and knowledge will be needed for your tutorial, and the approximate expected level of knowledge of your students (i.e., beginner, intermediate, advanced).

For examples of content and format, you can refer to past tutorials from past SciPy tutorial sessions (SciPy 2022, SciPy 2021, SciPy 2020, SciPy 2019, SciPy 2018, SciPy2017)

We are looking for interesting techniques or packages, helping new or advanced Python programmers develop better or faster scientific applications.

Information for tutorial presenters

Selection

Accepted tutorials will be announced late March. Final tutorial materials and instructions for attendees will be due on June 11th. This will include final version numbers of required software, detailed and tested installation instructions, and a test script that can be run by attendees to ensure that they have sufficient time to prepare their laptops before the conference. In addition, there will be a pre-tutorial slack channel created before the conference, and tutorial presenters are expected to make themselves available to help with setup instructions.

Stipend

In recognition of the effort required to plan and prepare a high quality tutorial, we pay a stipend of $1,000 to each instructor (or team of instructors) for each half-day session they lead.

For the submission you will need the following information:

  • A short bio of the presenter or team members, containing a description of past experiences as a trainer/teacher/speaker, and (ideally) links to videos of these experiences if available.

  • A list of prerequisite skills expected of attendees, so that participants can choose level appropriate tutorials.

  • A description of the tutorial, suitable for posting on the SciPy website for attendees to view. It should include the target audience, the expected level of knowledge prior to the class, and the goals of the class.

  • A more detailed outline of the tutorial content, including the duration of each part and exercise sessions. Please include a description of how you plan to make the tutorial hands-on.

  • Detailed installation instructions for various common Python environments so that attendees can have everything ready for participating before heading to SciPy.

  • If available, the tutorial notes, slides, exercise files, and IPython notebooks, even if they are preliminary.

Authors of exemplary submissions from previous years have generously agreed to share their proposals to help new instructors: https://github.com/scipy-conference/scipy-conference/tree/master/data/tutorial_submissions