31–40 of 51 posts
For non-CS people – if you're a little confused by "conference paper", CS is a little idiosyncratic in that papers are often primarily disseminated through conferences, rather than independent journals. The advice is good in general, though!
Yeah, and I always find the phrase "publish in a conference" to sound vaguely oxymoron-ish.
I wish the original title was kept ("How to win a best paper award"). It seems a good list for that. Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters". I would hope that would be of the most un important part of science, totally irrelevant to what's important and what matters. But maybe that's not true today.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Receive award
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems even less actionable, and somewhat misaligned with the OP article. “Taste” implies an ability to distinguish between a good example and a bad one. If it’s only recognizable in retrospect then it’s just another name for survivorship bias.
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But the comments have proven me wrong.
Best bit: Put in an unreasonable amount of effort > Earlier I made an analogy to being an explorer; here's another I like even more. Think of yourself as a wildlife photographer. Obviously you need to be in the right place (you won't get a great picture of anything from your couch) and you need to be skilled at your craft. But once you've met those preconditions, the way to get the best picture is to just spend an un…
The point is he is a superb writer in my book, it is fun to read and there are similarly good quotes that say the same in different ways. It is not enough to hone your technical skill alone because "the right circumstances" do not appear if you only change one variable.
When I read this I see someone having fun, being able to convey that is a good trait.
The article was so stunningly sanewashed & level-headed, I struggled to identify what in it may cause disagreement, or otherwise justify the label of 'opinionated'. But the comments have proven me wrong.
The actual title is "How to win a best paper award", which is quite different from doing "important research that matters". Most researchers work in very niche and specialized fields, sometimes for their whole life. They grant themselves all sorts of awards within their community, but it doesn't mean their research "matters".
> Another reason ignoring the literature can be helpful is that sometimes a bunch of work tries to solve some problem, and so everyone assumes it must be hard---just because no one has solved it yet, even though no one has really tried a fundamentally different approach How does one approach collaborators in this situation? Like, hey, I have this idea that solves the problem you have been trying to solve in a fundame…
Or more concretely that famous story where a student had solved certain open problems in statistics thinking they were homework problems.
I wish the original title was kept ("How to win a best paper award"). It seems a good list for that. Most of this list is about how to dress for senpai; figuratively speaking. A pretty depressing take on "how to do important research that matters". I would hope that would be of the most un important part of science, totally irrelevant to what's important and what matters. But maybe that's not true today.
How is that the case? The tips seem to aim for impactful research: picking good ideas and executing well on them. There's a tacit assumption that such impactful research will win best paper awards, but that's actually not substantiated and isn't obviously correct, since best paper selection committees can't see the future. For example, many (maybe most?) winners of retrospective awards (test-of-time / influential paper) aren't papers that won a best paper award when originally published.
Most of the author's papers he cites in the post, including the membership inference paper which is one of the papers the author is "most proud of," didn't win best paper awards.