Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The culture of rejection in computer science publications

sigbed.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 172 posts

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#151

Post by bcantrill »

It's a good article, but it's not making the (obvious?) jump: the conference model in computer science is broken. No other discipline does it this way, and it creates for ourselves this terrible program committee problem. The journal model has plenty of its own flaws, but it at least allows for iterative work. (That is, instead of rejecting a work outright, a journal can work with an author on the flaws, even if that requires doing substantial new work.) This is not to lionize the journal model, which has plenty of its own flaws -- and indeed, I personally think computer science should use its current laggard status as an opportunity to find a wholly new model, preferably one that is much more amenable to practitioner participation.[0]

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/p...

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#152

Post by noelwelsh »

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…

The Programming Journal (https://programming-journal.org/) and its associated conference seem pretty good to me. At least I find papers there that are interesting to me and are not unnecessarily obtuse in notation etc.

On the subject of reactive UIs, I'm quite enjoying reading the WebSharper papers at the moment. The most recent is, I think, http://www.simonjf.com/drafts/reactive-abstractions.pdf

Hope that's useful to you.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#153

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

mizzao wrote: post #8
wanderingmind wrote: post #4

I think we are not far off from virtual conferences where most sessions are presented by DallE generated presenters, speaking with wavenet generated audios in turn are presenting GPT generated papers.

Basically already happening in many Chinese departments and conferences, just without the AI yet, but of equivalent quality. (I'm ethnic Chinese and this is not meant to be a racially charged comment)

'(I'm ethnic Chinese and this is not meant to be a racially charged comment)'

that's not a carte blanche to stereotype a whole nation and it makes as much sense as a mailander chinese person badmouthing singapore taiwan or the abcs and using that excuse

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#154

Post by grayclhn »

blacksmithgu wrote: post #141
grayclhn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think this is often said cynically but is a good practice overall. Would you rather have to read and understand one giant commit reflecting 2 years of work, or 10 well-documented and logically complete individual commits?

The issue is that novel paper ideas will be split across multiple years (and even multiple conferences), making it much harder to actually see the whole picture for a reader. Each little piece of the paper will often also be bloated with unnecessary extra detail in order to reach the threshold for "minimum publishable paper".

Splitting up a groundbreaking idea into so many papers that the idea is lost is 1) going beyond a “minimal publishable unit” and 2) not in the authors’ interest, since getting credit for a groundbreaking idea in a correspondingly prestigious outlet is much better than getting credit for 2 or 3 bad ideas. I’m sure there’s a level of novelty where 2 irrelevant papers is better for the author than 1 single paper, but I don’t think we should design academic publishing around slightly-better-than-mediocre contributions.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#155

Post by tzumaoli »

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 am a graphics researcher who has been following your blog posts on your GPU vector graphics engine. I've been benefitted by your posts and I think some of the vector graphics renderer designs you discussed in your blog are genuinely novel and worth publishing as academic papers if written and evaluated properly. Please consider submitting them to a graphics venue like SIGGRAPH, EGSR, High Performance Graphics, or Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques if you find free time to do it. It will greatly benefit the community. ; )

By the way: graphics community does recognize contribution on fast and robust polynomial solvers! See the very recent work from Yuksel http://www.cemyuksel.com/research/polynomials/

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#156

Post by blagie »

whatshisface wrote: post #123
blagie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mystery. Behavior converges to incentives: * You do get academic points for chairing a conference, and as a chair, you do need to find reviewers. * A colleague is running a conference, and asks you to do a favor. You want to help your colleague. Reviewing papers wins you points with them, and declining to review burns bridges. When you're running a conference, you'd like them to reciprocate. Plus, they might be on…

> Reviewing papers wins you points with them, and declining to review burns bridges. When you're running a conference, you'd like them to reciprocate. Surely they'd get upset if you rejected all of the good papers, thereby ensuring that they would have a bad conference.

Why would they care? They get their name as the chair of the conference on their CV. No one remembers who chaired a specific year or how a given year went. If they did, there's enough noise in the process it wouldn't be attributed to the review process in particular. Some years, weaker papers come in, and others, stronger ones do.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#157

Post by blagie »

kleiba wrote: post #145
blagie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

studies show it's basically random The "basically" is important though, because there are some nuances to it. However, the point I've actually come here to make is that since publications are a strong factor for your career progress in academia, a corollary of the above is that making it in academia is basically random, too. Which is also true for other reasons, though: for every open professor position in a certain…

My experience is that for elite schools -- Stanford and MIT -- the remaining factor is how much one is willing to cheat. There is a random component, a merit-based component, but most (and I have large n here) successful affiliated faculty candidates did so by cheating in some way.

That can be data baking, credit theft, or a whole slew of other techniques, but at least in my department, most new faculty at least at these two schools are in some way crooked.

Also, for nuance on random:

http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#158

Post by snickerbockers »

xdavidliu wrote: post #134
Hackbraten wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acronym is not web-search friendly either. Been looking through this thread and search engines. Nothing helped. For example, not a single one of these [1] makes sense to me in that context. [1]: https://www.allacronyms.com/PC/university

this is one of my pet peeves. You and dozens of other people probably spent collectively hundreds to thousands of minutes and brain cells wondering what PC stood for, while the people who originally typed "PC" instead of program committee saved maybe a fifth of a second.

It's especially annoying because they should have known that PC was already taken as an acronym by something else far more prominent within the same domain.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#159

Post by eatbitseveryday »

Test0129 wrote: post #52
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #9

This is a reason I gave up doing systems research. It’s full of cliques and negativity. It became a process whereby we were even trained to accept this rejection frequency as normal and to expect retrying for years. You keep submitting a paper and revising it for months even while working on the next idea (can’t just sit around fixing a paper, PhD work must always continue). Rejections also directly impact a student’…

I left my PhD in computational geometry for similar reasons. I was told flat out by my advisor that the chances of me getting a paper accepted in even a middling journal were low. Not normally low (as in tough review), but so low because the entire field is dominated by a handful of very high profile researchers and mathematicians that essentially gate keep knowledge on it. It was also necessary to publish some paper…

One slight saving grace (after having graduated) is to feel fine writing documents like papers and just putting them up on https://arxiv.org/ under my own terms.

One additional technique I learned from others is to use submissions to conferences as a way to get feedback on your work without any expectation that it gets accepted. You do that early knowing there are flaws, but do it to get early warnings from reviewers about rejection points.

Now you could do the same being outside academia, as a way to get feedback on something and then just call it “done” on some paper on your terms.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#160

Post by Ar-Curunir »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #19

It doesn't matter what color you are. It doesn't matter where you're from. If you create something like what Dijkstra created back in 56' (undeniable innovation), then no door will remain shut. That's the beauty of Math, CompSci, or STEM as a whole. Not to be too blunt, but I'd rather we keep this soft, "everyone should be accepted" nonsense out of CompSci. The cream will rise to the top. Anyone complaining just need…

Edward Lee (the author of this piece) is the cream that has risen to the top. He’s a top level respected scientist. This piece is clearly not coming from a place of jealousy or softness.
Post reply on HN