Important dates
Paper submission: November 2nd, 2015
Author notification: November 18th, 2015
Camera-ready version: December 2nd, 2015

2015 Workshop on
 Negative Outcomes,
  Post-mortems, and
   Experiences

In conjunction with MICRO 2015
December 6, 2015

Waikiki, Hawaii

What is NOPE?
Not all research projects end up with positive results. Sometimes ideas that sound enticing at first run into unexpected complexity, high overheads, or turn out simply infeasible. Such projects often end up in a proverbial researcher's drawer, and the community as a whole is not aware of dead-end or hard-to-advance research directions. NOPE is a venue that encourages publishing such results in all their "badness".

What is a "good failure"?
The best negative results help us learn from our mistakes. They can illuminate hidden obstacles or demonstrate why we need a change of course. An ideal submission to NOPE has a novel idea which sounds plausible from first principles or design intuition, but yields little to no improvement (in performance, power, area, …) in practice. The paper drills down into the reasons for the lack of improvement and proposes a plausible explanation – different technology trends, unexpected implementation complexity.

Call for Papers
Our goal is to find papers which the community can learn from and might otherwise have trouble finding a suitable venue, so we take a broad view of what constitutes a "negative" result. A good NOPE submission might entail:
Thorough evaluations of failed projects which uncover and characterize the root cause.
Papers which describe both positive and negative results, with an emphasis on the underlying reasons behind why some succeeded and other failed.
Cradle-to-grave examination of completed projects, specifically to dissect dead-ends and unworkable solutions encountered along the way.
Design space explorations or comprehensive experiments which suggest a particular technique is unlikely to work under a realistic set of assumptions.
Research which uncovers fundamental limitations in scalability, performance, accuracy, or other quantifiable metrics.
Any research which serves to share the lessons of failure to the broader community, such that we can avoid repeating them in the future.
A pdf version suitable for distribution can be downloaded here: NOPE 2015 CFP

Important dates
Paper submission: November 2nd, 2015
Author notification: November 18th, 2015
Camera-ready version: December 2nd, 2015

Organizers
David Brooks, Harvard
Svilen Kanev, Harvard
Bob Adolf, Harvard
Brandon Reagen, Harvard

Program Committee
Chris Batten, Cornell
Luis Ceze, University of Washington
Tipp Moseley, Google
Thomas Wenisch, Univesrity of Michigan

Contact
Questions? Send us an email.