About autodiff.org

The website autodiff.org is a free and non-commercial community portal to automatic differentiation (AD) available to researchers with a standing interest in AD and its applications. Autodiff.org is dedicated to collecting, organizing and disseminating information about all aspects of AD in order to share results across communities. Its primary role is to link together the AD community.

Founding Members

• Martin Bücker, Friedrich Schiller University Jena
• Paul Hovland (co-founder), Argonne National Laboratory

Technical Developers

• Torsten Bosse (2024–today), Friedrich Schiller University Jena
• Cristian Wente (2006–2012), RWTH Aachen University
• Heiner Bach (2000–2006), RWTH Aachen University

History and future of autodiff.org

For a long time, the web site of the Computational Differentiation project at Argonne National Laboratory was the major source of AD-related internet pages. The idea of autodiff.org originated in late 1999 and early 2000 when Martin Bücker and Paul Hovland discussed the website of the Computational Differentiation project, trying to sort out general aspects of AD from those specific to the AD research at Argonne. In the summer of 2000, the general outline of autodiff.org was further refined at the AD meeting in Nice during a brainstorming of several AD researchers including Christian Bischof and Andreas Griewank. The actual implementation started in autumn 2000 and its inital implementation was first introduced to the AD community when Martin Bücker gave a presentation entitled "autodiff.org: Goals of the Website on Automatic Differentiation" at an AD meeting in Hatfield, UK, November 16, 2000. The next significant step was the availability of the publication database in 2002. The general philosophy behind the publication database and its interactive features were explained in Martin Bücker's talk "What you can do for autodiff.org" at an AD Tool Meeting in Aachen, Germany, April 25, 2002.

In its current version, autodiff.org is far from being complete. For instance, it omits the work in validated methods and certain application areas. We try to address these shortcoming in the near future and also plan to integrate an AD digest designed to become the medium of choice for announcing the availability of recent AD-related research articles (preprints), new conferences, courses, software, books, jobs, etc.

Acknowledgements

With his AD bibliography containing BibTex of entries the first three international AD conferences (Breckenridge, Santa Fe, Nice), George Corliss of Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA, helped to set up the publication database. The company FastOpt at Hamburg, Germany, also contributed to the database.

From 2000 to 2013, this web site was hosted by RWTH Aachen University with the kind support of RWTH's Institute for Scientific Computing and the Center for Computing and Communication. Since 2013, Friedrich Schiller University Jena with its Chair for Advanced Computing is hosting this web site.