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RIP Usenix ATC

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#31

Post by musicale »

bcantrill wrote: post #23
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic CS has no shortage of prestigious or even good publishing venues. Just within systems and networking, there is SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys, PODC, DISC, FAST, SIGCOMM, CIDR. If you extend to databases there's also VLDB, SIGMOD, etc. These are all Tier-1/Tier-1.5 venues. Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.

You made this comment twice, so I guess I'll reply to it twice, but the reality is that the acceptance rates of ATC was very, very low (again, under 13% in 2004). Low acceptance rates actually do indicate a shortage of good publishing venues (certainly relative to the number of submissions), but it would be interesting to look at the ATC acceptance rate over time; if it was much (much) higher in its final years, it w…

17% in 2024. More submissions than other conferences. Attendance numbers probably skewed by cross-registration with OSDI.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#32

Post by Ar-Curunir »

bcantrill wrote: post #23
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic CS has no shortage of prestigious or even good publishing venues. Just within systems and networking, there is SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys, PODC, DISC, FAST, SIGCOMM, CIDR. If you extend to databases there's also VLDB, SIGMOD, etc. These are all Tier-1/Tier-1.5 venues. Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.

You made this comment twice, so I guess I'll reply to it twice, but the reality is that the acceptance rates of ATC was very, very low (again, under 13% in 2004). Low acceptance rates actually do indicate a shortage of good publishing venues (certainly relative to the number of submissions), but it would be interesting to look at the ATC acceptance rate over time; if it was much (much) higher in its final years, it w…

https://github.com/emeryberger/csconferences indicates that ATC acceptance rate has averaged 20% in the last five years, so better than ~13%, but not by too much.

However, at least speaking as an academic, I wouldn't say that ~20% acceptance rate is necessarily indicative of a shortage of good venues. There is plenty of not-so-good research that is submitted to top places that has no hope of getting in. (My experience is from computer security research, where the acceptance rate of security conferences has gone down, but the fraction of good papers has also actually gone down, so the fraction of good papers getting in has roughly stayed the same.)

That being said, ATC seems to indeed have been a high-prestige conference back in the day, and hence indeed competitive. My experience is from recent years, where it was viewed as a good-but-not-tier-1 conference in systems research.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#33

Post by sedev »

bcantrill wrote: post #22
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think academics view ATC as particularly highly prestigious. Just within systems there are many other conferences which are either more, or just as, prestigious as ATC: OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGCOMM, EuroSys. Especially the first three are viewed to be much higher prestige than ATC, at least from my perspective.

I really don't care about how prestigious academics view (or viewed) ATC, but for whatever it's worth when our paper was accepted in 2004, was just under 13%. That is bluntly too oversubscribed for the practitioner (whose job is to ship systems, not win paper popularity contests -- or adjudicate those popularity contests by serving on program committees). In some ways, if ATC wasn't thought prestigious, it's even wor…

Request for clarification: 13% of what?

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#34

Post by bcantrill »

sedev wrote: post #33
bcantrill wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't care about how prestigious academics view (or viewed) ATC, but for whatever it's worth when our paper was accepted in 2004, was just under 13%. That is bluntly too oversubscribed for the practitioner (whose job is to ship systems, not win paper popularity contests -- or adjudicate those popularity contests by serving on program committees). In some ways, if ATC wasn't thought prestigious, it's even wor…

Request for clarification: 13% of what?

13% of submissions to the conference were accepted to present.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#35

Post by DonHopkins »

rootbear wrote: post #13
DonHopkins wrote: post #4

It was a fun conference. RIP. Anybody remember the January 21–23 '87 Winter Usenix in Washington, DC, that got snowed in by the giant "Blizzard of Discontent" with 14 inches of snow that closed down Metro? The beloved/infamous Mayor Marion "The Bitch Set Me Up" Barry was attending the Super Bowl in California at the time, a fine tradition that Ted Cruz honored in Cancun during the February 2021 winter storm in Texas.…

I definitely remember that one, one of the first ATCs I attended. I took an NFS course and the speaker told us that after the class was over for the day, all of the Californians were planning to go out and play in the snow! I had planned to show off my brand new "DEV CAR" license plates at that ATC, but the snow was so bad I took Metro. I still have those tags.

Sounds like you needed "DEV PLOW" for DC!

And "DEV HORSE" for Phoenix.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#36

Post by anonymousDan »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #20
khuey wrote: post #3

IMO the implication that the "in-person conference" nature of the forum is what led to its demise rather than its capture by academics/abandonment by industry practitioners is incorrect. I think a better summary of the cause is that most academic research is not that relevant to industry but academics need the prestige of forums like Usenix ATC in a way that industry does not which naturally leads to squeezing indust…

I don't think academics view ATC as particularly highly prestigious. Just within systems there are many other conferences which are either more, or just as, prestigious as ATC: OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGCOMM, EuroSys. Especially the first three are viewed to be much higher prestige than ATC, at least from my perspective.

I think ATC is viewed as being a prestigious conference at roughly the level of some of the above.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#37

Post by anonymousDan »

dadrian wrote: post #28

I think people are glossing over the fact that Usenix ATC wasn’t even a good academic conference. If you’re submitting high-quality academic work to Usenix, you’re sending it to one of the higher prestige Usenix conferences in a specific subfield, such as Usenix Security or NSDI.

I don't agree with this. ATC is a good systems conference.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#39

Post by riedel »

anonymousDan wrote: post #37
dadrian wrote: post #28

I think people are glossing over the fact that Usenix ATC wasn’t even a good academic conference. If you’re submitting high-quality academic work to Usenix, you’re sending it to one of the higher prestige Usenix conferences in a specific subfield, such as Usenix Security or NSDI.

I don't agree with this. ATC is a good systems conference.

This is not really a contradiction, IMHO. I published about systems 15 yrs ago and experienced the crisis in systems research. My personal take is, that the academic community failed to set new standards and research methods for computing system. (Maybe they cannot even exist in our short lived publish or perish world) I still review for conferences that still have systems (like ieee percom), but it is really difficult to reach consensus on system papers in comparison to AI or HCI stuff, that is also published.

Re: RIP Usenix ATC

#40

Post by pcwalton »

khuey wrote: post #30
romesmoke wrote: post #26

I perceive a negative colouring of the "academic" notion in this post. And I totally get some of the pathologies implied: publish-or-perish is a harsh environment, lots of snobbery. With all respect, however, this industry/academia dualism looks to me at best as a false and at worst as a harmful dichotomy. I mean, there are similarly cliché pathologies in whatever one chooses to overload "industry" with. There are su…

> successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust) Is Rust loved by academics? And much more importantly in my mind, was it even recognized by academics before it became an industrial success? The very first published Rust paper that I'm aware of appeared in the "ACM SIGAda Ada Letters" ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2692956.2663188 ). Today that paper is the most cited paper to ever appear…

Yes, all Rust papers anyone tried to submit were consistently rejected up until Rust became popular, at which point Rust became the hot new thing in applied programming language research. Academic PL is very insular (to its detriment, I'm convinced).
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