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The culture of rejection in computer science publications

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Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#101

Post by muxamilian »

g9yuayon wrote: post #91
krinchan wrote: post #39

The academic system is completely broken for Computer Science, and I don't really see a way to fix it. The economic realities of the field just make it too risky to allow an exceptionally gifted individual to remain out in the open publishing research that could potentially destroy your business model. Justifying these low acceptance rates as somehow prestigious is really just creating even more perverse incentives t…

I saw a list of acceptance rate here: https://github.com/lixin4ever/Conference-Acceptance-Rate . Is 18% or so acceptance rate really low, though? Almost 2 in 10 submissions are accepted, and I thought "the top" meant something like 2% or less. BTW, is there any resources that catalogs which ideas in papers may work well in industry? As someone outside of academia, I find there are simply too many papers, even from to…

There's also self selection: You're only going to submit to a top conference if you think there is a slight chance of your work being accepted. Thus, one could argue that papers submitted to top conferences are already better than average. This means that the acceptance rate is way lower in fact.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#102

Post by raphlinus »

This topic is close to my heart. I do research on the fundamentals of 2D graphics, some of it cutting edge (especially GPU techniques), others just selecting the best known techniques (for example, right now I'm doing a bit of a deep dive into robust cubic and quartic polynomial root finders, not really academically publishable, but potentially hugely useful for others working on similar problems).

I made a serious attempt to submit some of my GPU monoid work to academic conferences earlier this year, got rejected. As someone who doesn't have the "publish or perish" incentive of actually being in academia, it's really just not worth it.

I'm also doing inquiry into UI, for example architectural patterns in reactive systems. The current state of academic literature on this topic seems to be terrible (though please point out counterexamples!). Most of what's written is marketing material for UI frameworks - there's an explosion of those, especially in the JavaScript world, but very little synthesis of the core concepts. I wouldn't even attempt to try to submit an academic paper on this topic, though I think it would likely be useful to the world.

It feels like there should be a space to publish work that is not novel in an academic sense, but useful. Wikipedia is not it (their articles on cubic and quartic equations are garbage when it comes to numerical concerns), Stack Overflow is not it, academic conferences and journals are not it. I'm using my blog, generally successfully, but it feels there should be a more systematic approach.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#104

Post by [deleted] »

logisticseh wrote: post #41
krinchan wrote: post #39

The academic system is completely broken for Computer Science, and I don't really see a way to fix it. The economic realities of the field just make it too risky to allow an exceptionally gifted individual to remain out in the open publishing research that could potentially destroy your business model. Justifying these low acceptance rates as somehow prestigious is really just creating even more perverse incentives t…

> The "cream" rising to the top is often less genius and more politically savvy with the right connections on the PC. I'm generally nauseated when I interact with American CS academics. Every time I attend a conference, PC, or NSF panel, I am so glad I chose industry. It's like IRL twitter. (Europe seems to be better for some reason.) > If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from the private sector you s…

[deleted]

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#105

Post by musicale »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #69
Athas wrote: post #2

I wonder if this culture arises out of necessity. Many conferences claim to not have a set quota of papers they accept, but in practice there is a limitation to how many presentations can be accommodated given the physical and temporal limitations of the venue. The quota may grow slightly over time, either by shrinking the time allotted to every presentation (ICFP is really squeezing it these years, for example) or a…

But journals do have an economic restriction. More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only go so far. I suppose page charges might balance some of the editorial costs, but those are also limiting. They can't be too high or they'll chase away submissions.

> More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only go so far

arxiv.org's budget is instructive: around $2M for 181K new submissions and a digital library of around 2M articles. Works out to about $12 per new submission.

For a reviewed journal or conference, presumably all published papers would have to be reviewed, much as they are currently by volunteer reviewers who review all papers before publication or rejection. If Prof. Lee is right then reviewing effort could go down overall due to fewer resubmissions.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#106

Post by [deleted] »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #46
karpierz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cream generally rises, sure. But at what rate? And how long will they stay in the game without recognition before giving up? And do those numbers differ based on your color or where you're from?

> But at what rate? And how long will they stay in the game without recognition before giving up? And do those numbers differ based on your color or where you're from? If you provide that data, we can continue the conversation. However, the truths in my original post stand firm. STEM is an objective field. Sure, there may be issues with equality of opportunity, but that's outside the scope of my argument. Equality of…

[deleted]

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#107

Post by YorkshireSeason »

raphlinus wrote: post #102

This topic is close to my heart. I do research on the fundamentals of 2D graphics, some of it cutting edge (especially GPU techniques), others just selecting the best known techniques (for example, right now I'm doing a bit of a deep dive into robust cubic and quartic polynomial root finders, not really academically publishable, but potentially hugely useful for others working on similar problems). I made a serious a…

I found myself in a somewhat similar situation. I learned to thing long-term:

(1) Publish initial ideas not in top conferences, but in second rate venues. Most publications in top conferences are, clearly, refinements of ideas that were first presented in inchoate form, in less prestigious workshops. Paradoxically, prestigious conferences don't like brand new ideas, but they like polished papers. And they like concrete open problems being solved. If a paper starts "We are solving the longstanding open problem from [17]" then that dramatically increases acceptance probability: most submissions to prestigious conferences are not rejected b/c they are wrong, but because it's unclear why they are more siginficant than all the other submissions. Solving a concrete open problem gives you social proof that the problem is significant (others worked on it) and hard (people failed). How do you create concrete open problems? By leaving them as concrete open problems in a previous paper.

(2) Create your own conferences. All now famous conferences started as small, low prestige workshops 10-20 years ago, e.g. the "Oakland" security workshop (now: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy).

I learned this from my post-doc mentor, who is now a famous scientist with a whole research tradition to his name, that he created, bootstrapping from a first workshop paper.

PS, is your monoid work online, is it this https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11659 ? I'm interested in monoids on GPUs.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#108

Post by cauefcr »

kazinator wrote: post #103

This one has an easy fix! If you're in computing and want to produce garbage that is accepted anyway, don't write papers: write software .

There are PR reviews worse than the #2 reviewer of most papers, so it's all about new software or forks, don't even bother upstreaming. /s

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#109

Post by marcosdumay »

blagie wrote: post #62
ath0 wrote: post #32

I'm long past my academia phase, but recently led the PC for an industry conference (accept rate: ~15%). 1. Curation is important both for the physical limits (venues only fit a certain number of people), attention limits (attendees will usually retain only a handful of "nuggets" no matter how packed the agenda is) and interaction limits (you can't meet everyone at a large conference). 2. If the goal of a conference…

I'm well-known in a research community. I'm positioned such that I don't need more academic points. I've mostly stopped publishing in branded prestige academic venues, in part due to rejection rates. My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my whole career where the reviewers did a pro…

I may have been radicalized during my short time in the academic world, but IMO, conferences are a really bad setting to disseminate new ideas. They just don't favor it. In practice, you have people preaching their ideas, a lot of people not listening, and a few misunderstanding. Nobody else.

Spreading ideas is better done on paper, with guided discussion, and without time limits. Or, in other worlds, on something like paper-split hierarchical internet forums.

Conferences can be useful to discuss and work over known ideas. For that, they should always bring papers that are already published, and had some community attention. The idea of debuting new ideas over unprepared people is antagonistic to that goal.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#110

Post by raphlinus »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #107
raphlinus wrote: post #102

This topic is close to my heart. I do research on the fundamentals of 2D graphics, some of it cutting edge (especially GPU techniques), others just selecting the best known techniques (for example, right now I'm doing a bit of a deep dive into robust cubic and quartic polynomial root finders, not really academically publishable, but potentially hugely useful for others working on similar problems). I made a serious a…

I found myself in a somewhat similar situation. I learned to thing long-term: (1) Publish initial ideas not in top conferences, but in second rate venues. Most publications in top conferences are, clearly, refinements of ideas that were first presented in inchoate form, in less prestigious workshops. Paradoxically, prestigious conferences don't like brand new ideas, but they like polished papers. And they like concre…

> PS, is your monoid work online, is it this https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11659 ? I'm interested in monoids on GPUs.

Yes, that's the draft on arXiv, and I have a blog post in the pipeline[1] explaining it to a more general audience.

And thanks for the other advice, I'll consider it!

[1] https://github.com/raphlinus/raphlinus.github.io/issues/66

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