[Air-L] [reminder] Histories of Computing in Eastern Europe (Poznan, Poland, Sept. 2018; review of papers begins May 1)

[Chris Leslie]

Please forward to your colleagues and among your networks …

Call for Papers
Histories of Computing in Eastern Europe
IFIP Working Group 9.7

Part of the 24th IFIP World Congress
Poznan University of Technology, Poland
19-21 September 2018

Papers are now being accepted for the history of computing workshop at the next IFIP World Computing Congress, which will be held in September 2018. This is not only fifty years after the so-called Garmisch conference coined the phrase software engineering, but also it was at a place that fifty years before barely was thinkable as a conference location because of the Cold War. Both anniversary and location are useful reminders that computing and informatics rely on the international community for innovation.

IFIP’s Working Group 9.7, which is dedicated to international histories of computing, is sponsoring a series of papers on 19-21 September to illuminate this important context as part of the IFIP World Congress in Poznań, Poland. Given the World Congress’s location, we are particularly interested in histories that reflect computing and informatics in eastern Europe. Academic historians and lovers of history, computing and informatics professionals, archivists, museum curators, and others are welcome to submit papers for this workshop.

A highlight of the workshop will be a remote demonstration of the Bombe created by Alan Turing that is demonstrated to visitors of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom. The Bombe was used to find the initial settings for the Enigma machines each day. To celebrate the work of the three distinguished Polish cryptographers – Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski – and the major contribution they made to the reading of Enigma messages throughout the Second World War, a message enciphered using Enigma coding will be transmitted from Poznań to Bletchley Park and be decoded using the replica Turing Bombe after which a reply will be sent back.

As has been the working group's past practice, we request submission of draft papers for consideration. Accepted papers will be revised based on comments from reviewers and be distributed to participants before the workshop to ensure a lively conversation. After the workshop, authors will have the chance to incorporate feedback from the audience before submitting their final papers for consideration in the edited volume of selected papers for the proceedings, which will be published by Springer as a volume in the IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology (IFIP-AICT) series.

In order to participate, please submit a draft of your paper via the Springer Online Conference Service. The OCS portal for this workshop is available at https://ocs.springer.com/ocs/home/HCEE2018. More information about OCS and the workshop more generally is available on the working group website (http://ifipwg97.org).

Review of draft papers will begin May 1 and continue until June 15. Revised versions of accepted papers will be distributed to conference participants on September 1. Enquires in advance of your submission or questions about Springer OCS may be addressed to the chair of the working group, Chris Leslie (chrisleslienyc at hotmail.com).