The hidden story behind the suicide of ECE PhD Candidate Huixiang Chen • Hacker News Board

Re: The hidden story behind the suicide of ECE PhD Candidate Huixiang Chen

#11

Post by olliej » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 4:34 AM UTC

D_u20ac35_ming wrote: post #6

I'm happy to read Huixiang's text, in that they are clear in explaining his PIs transgressions. I'm in a similar situation where my PI is threatening to kick me out of the lab or fail me after 5 years in the program after bringing him data better than all of his last 5 students combined. So I definitely know where the ECE candidate is coming from. But the PhD candidate needed to step away from his data/project and in…

The problem is that “stepping away” can alone have consequences - for international students the potential downside is massive. I vaguely recall that for some people the visa is terminated essentially the moment that they cease being a student - would you want to be a foreigner in America with an expired visa today? Maybe it’s fine for most, but what if you were a Mexican student - that clearly puts you in line for a concentration camp, would you risk it?

And this kid had already done everything he was meant to, why would they think anything else would work?

Re: The hidden story behind the suicide of ECE PhD Candidate Huixiang Chen

#12

Post by wsxcde » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

Athas wrote: post #7

musicale wrote: post #3

This sounds like a terrible story with no winners. If it is true, it seems like a terrible case of student abuse, as well as fraud and corruption in the ISCA review process (ISCA presumably still being the ostensible top computer architecture conference), and another highly damning indictment of graduate education and universities ignoring the mental health and safety of their students. I am also feeling less enthusi…

> I think CS and EE may need to de-emphasize conferences and try to improve journals. I agree. Both because it may lead to a more reasonable working pace (we have the Internet for low-latency dissemination anyway), but also because the relentless long-distance travel is not environmentally sustainable.

Journal reviews can be stacked with friends just as easily. In fact, most top CS/EE journals ask authors to recommend reviewers. (In theory, the editors will make sure the recommendations are conflict-free and sensible, but given their workloads, I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of them took the authors' suggestions at face value.)

Re: The hidden story behind the suicide of ECE PhD Candidate Huixiang Chen

#13

Post by wsxcde » Wed, Jul 03, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

musicale wrote: post #3

This sounds like a terrible story with no winners. If it is true, it seems like a terrible case of student abuse, as well as fraud and corruption in the ISCA review process (ISCA presumably still being the ostensible top computer architecture conference), and another highly damning indictment of graduate education and universities ignoring the mental health and safety of their students. I am also feeling less enthusi…

I think computer architecture is especially prone to this sort of nonsense. The whole field has a weird insider-bias and most program committee members seem to come from the same schools, have the same advisors, and write the same sort of papers.

I find it kinda interesting that Moritz Lipp and Daniel Gruss have revolutionized our understanding of microarchitectural side channels and not a single one of their papers has appeared in ISCA/ASPLOS/MICRO. And yet, obviously flawed nonsense supposedly addressing side channels regularly manages to appear in these conferences.