This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
|
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
FOCS Accepts and a Movie
Posted by Lance
The list of accepted papers for FOCS 2006 has been posted. Since I was on the program committee I won't comment on the papers or the process.So instead I offer to you this short movie (16 MB, 3:14) using soccer to explain Euclid's theorem that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Part of a new British project science.tv.
5:13 AM #
-
I watched the movie and could find no connection between the narrative (a nice exposition of Euclid's proof) and the visual (mostly a plain old amateur soccer match). To me it looked a bit like reciting from The Animal Farm to the tune of The Ring Cycle, or is it only me?
-
Wow, is the person with the most papers in FOCS this year an undergrad?
-
> Wow, is the person with the most
> papers in FOCS this year an undergrad?
No, Assaf Naor received a BSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1996. =)
-
I think he meant Mihai.
-
There's a goof with the voice over! He says football instead of soccer. They probably did the voice recording before the clips were even edited.
-
Mihai is now a graduate student too, so it doesn't apply either. Still, three FOCS papers for a first year PhD student is not too bad.
-
"Mihai is now a graduate student too..."
He wasn't when he submitted.
-
Eldar,
I believe that the only connection is in Marcus du Sautoy's love for football and prime numbers. The team you see playing is indeed his own amateur football team, and the team does play regularly with jerseys sporting prime numbers on.
Marcus du Sautoy is professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and the author of the excellent book
The Music of the Primes. Check it out, if you have not read it already.
-
Marcus du Sautoy is professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and the author of the excellent book
The Music of the Primes. Check it out, if you have not read it already.
I'll second that emotion!
-
Nice program. And now, let's give some awards based on the titles.
Best titles :
-------------
Planar Earthmover is not in L_1 -- informative and concise
Accidental Algorithms -- very intriguing!
How to Play any Unique Game -- arouses curiosity
Worst title:
------------
Local Peeing and Service Contracts in Strategic Network Formation -- inappropriate for FOCS Theory
Longest title:
--------------
Point Location in o(log n) Time, Voronoi diagrams in o(n log n) time, and Other Transdichotomous Results in Computational Geometry
Most boring titles:
-------------------
(They say what they do, no more and no less)
An Omega(n^{1/3}) Lower Bound for Bilinear Group Based Private Information Retrieval
Faster Algorithms for Approximate Distance Oracles and All-Pairs Small Stretch Paths
Improved Bounds for Online Routing and Packing via a Primal-Dual Approach
Improved approximation algorithms for multidimensional bin packing problems
Most secretive title :
-----------------------------------
Points on Computable Curves -- surely the authors can make a little effort to tell us more!
Words conveying the least information:
-----------------------------------
"Fast" (as in "Fast algorithms" -- when is someone going to advertise "slow algorithms"?)
"Faster"
"and More"
"Efficiently"
Most unappealing word to occur in a title:
-------------------------------
"Improved" -- that's a big turnoff for me. I'd rather read the original or the final ("optimal") construction than an "improved" anything.
Runner-up: "Towards"
-
"Local Peeing and Service Contracts in Strategic Network Formation -- inappropriate for FOCS Theory"
That's pretty inappropriate, I agree. But that's not the title, fortunately.
-
Most unappealing word to occur in a title: "Improved" and "Towards"
Interesting. Science is built one brick at a time, but if the title happens to acknowledge the incremental nature of what we do, then it is "unappealing".
It seems that papers named "towards" should be the ones with longer lasting impact. They are presumably addressing a problem of such importance and difficulty that even a partial solution or analysis of the problem is worth publishing. In contrast, yet another optimal algorithm for some made up problem is likely to have much less relevance.
-
Come on, it's unfair to count me as graduate student :-) I'm only starting in September. These were definetely undergrad papers.
While talking about titles, don't we get some notice for the "most oxymoronic title" or something? :-) We tried pretty hard:
Higher Lower Bounds for Near-Neighbor and Further Rich Problems
-
Come on, it's unfair to count me as graduate student :-) I'm only starting in September. These were definetely undergrad papers.
Nah, let's face it: you are now over the hill. :-) :-)
-
"Come on, it's unfair to count me as graduate student :-) I'm only starting in September. These were definetely undergrad papers."
This is not fair. Only being undergrad is not important. Your age should be around 25 in which some people complete their Ph.D. and even people like Erik Demaine are associate professor at that time. So just being an undergrad is not that important, esp. if you have started research at the edge of 20.
-
Actually I am still 23; I think it's a bit of a stretch to say this is an age when many people complete PhDs.
Of course, I could have gotten much further by now, Erik being the perfect example :-)) On the other hand, it's all in the choice of the metric -- I do currently have more STOC/FOCS papers than him (so no comparison with him when he got the job at MIT).
While at it, let me give you something to ponder. My undergrad career was made possible by Erik, who decided to fund a freshman to work on whatever he fancied (honestly, I had him convinced for maybe 1 year that my main interest is number theory). He continued to give me unconditional support (funds, university rule bending etc), even as it became clear that we are very incompatible researchers and the chances we could actually work together on a problem are virtually nil.
Really, how many professors would put so much faith in an undergrad? It's a style of advising that works for a tiny minority, and it takes a lot of inspiration to get it right.
-
Higher Lower Bounds for Near-Neighbor and Further Rich Problems
How can that have escaped me. Great title! If you could just keep the boldface for the final title, so that people like me, who are not into subtlety, have a chance to notice it, that would be great...
-
Titles can still change while authors are preparing the final versions. Maybe we can collectively give them advice to build better FOCS titles?
For example (not knowing the actual paper contents):
Generalized Dobrushin Uniqueness
Local Switching Connects Peer-to-Peer Networks
Inclusion-Exclusion colors graphs in O(2^n)
Non-Uniform Buy-at-Bulk Network Design
Allocation problems: beyond 1-1/e
On the Hardness of Learning Halfspace Intersections
Algorithms for LogConcave Functions
Computing the surface area of a convex body with heat flows
On random projections of matrices
Primal-Dual Routes and Packs Online
On Dynamic Planar Point Location
On Multidimensional binpacking
Inclusion-Exclusion counts set partitions
PageRank Vectors partition graphs locally
Learning Halfspaces and Parities with Noise
Breaking the information theory barrier in computational geometry
Lloyd type methods for k-means
-
Come on people, everyone knows that the universal formula for calculating TCS coolness is
(# FOCS/STOC papers)*(number of sexual partners)/(AGE - 20)
-
(# FOCS/STOC papers)*(number of sexual partners)/(AGE - 20)
shouldn't you square the age, if you want to measure some steady rates for #papers/year and #partners/year?
-
This year MIT is amazing in the number of accepted papers. Is there any one from Cornell or Berkeley (I see at least one from CMU and one from Stanford)?
-
"have more STOC/FOCS papers than him"
Please do not use again this kind of completely incorrect comparison of couting only STOC/FOCS papers and ignoring SODA/SOCG papers esp. for an algorithms person.
-
How can a comparison be incorrect? - Maybe its incomplete. So don't forget to count the PODC, SPAA, ESA, ISAAC, RANDOM ... papers esp. for an algorithms person.
-
Please do not use again this kind of completely incorrect comparison of couting only STOC/FOCS papers and ignoring SODA/SOCG papers esp. for an algorithms person.
Yes, I totally agree. I was merely emphasizing that people impose different notions of success on themselves, eg it's not totally undefendable to have staid for a full 4 years in undergrad and gotten more STOC/FOCS papers in the process :-)
On a different note, this view of "STOC/FOCS and algorithms people" seems mostly an artifact, esp when looking at the current list of accepted papers. Lots of very diverse algorithms in there...
-
I hope the people commenting above are imposters, otherwise it seems that TCS is full of - sorry to say this - fools.
-
eg it's not totally undefendable to have staid for a full 4 years in undergrad and gotten more STOC/FOCS papers in the process :-)
It is quite Ok to do have taken longer. Just ask Erik how many years earlier he could have finished his PhD if time had been the driving consideration.
this view of "STOC/FOCS and algorithms people" seems mostly an artifact, esp when looking at the current list of accepted papers.
One swallow does not Spring make.
-
I never heard so much "academic" shit like the above. It seems that education at MIT is at an all time low.
Spend less time counting your papers, or how many months will take to do better than somebody else, and go have a life.
-
"have more STOC/FOCS papers than him"
Mihai, forget the numbers. Over the long run people won't remember how many papers you have, but rather the quality of the work you do.
Question: how many papers did Einstein published in his life? Answer: who cares!
-
Come on, don't attack the guy for an unfortunate phrasing.
What Patrascu has accomplished so far is rather impressive (even if you see his research as a number; ~10 stoc/focs/soda papers).
How many graduate students accompish that by the end of their PhD?
And by the way, numbers *are* important: A PhD graduate with 4-5 stoc/focs papers is considered to be of "top quality" - at least for the job market.
I agree of course that "numbers" is an artificial metric; however, it is arguably the most influential variable when one is on the academic market.
Moreover, how many researchers (especially students) produce top-top work?
-
Come on, don't attack the guy for an unfortunate phrasing.
Unfortunate phrasing? Have you seen Mihai's web page?
-
Allow me to be honored for you giving me Einstein as an example :-)
The issue is a bit stupid. My usual rhetoric is about too many people treating this as a numbers game (esp given too many publication venues). People who know me personally have probably heard this a few too many times. The only other time I posted to this blog was a few weeks ago, when I was saying exactly this (and yes, I was signing just like now), and of course I got slammed for it.
So no, I'm not one who thinks numbers are too important. But if you do talk numbers, get them right, and don't tell me I'm a quasi-loser for not having a PhD+tenure by this age. Like I said, those criteria are virtually as relative as numbers.
-
Allow me to be honored for you giving me Einstein as an example :-)
Permission granted :-)
But if you do talk numbers, get them right, and don't tell me I'm a quasi-loser for not having a PhD+tenure by this age. Like I said, those criteria are virtually as relative as numbers.
That comment was either in jest or by someone jealous of your success. Either way, pay no attention to it.
-
Unfortunate phrasing? Have you seen Mihai's web page?
It's good the ball was raised to the net about this one :-) I think people should be all but forced to create something like this. Maybe this post will convince more people to do it.
The point is, we have too many publication venues. So what do you think about somebody who publishes 30%+ of papers is STOC/FOCS/SODA? He's a guy with good intentions, but not God, so he of course can't always get perfect results, and likes to also record partial progress in smaller conferences.
What do you think of a guy with 80% of the papers in CCCG/ISAAC/COCOON/...? He's a guy who would only think of an important problem by accident; his usual style is to invent minor things and generate publications.
NB, some people are trying to address this problem in other ways, eg Erik is convincing people to treat CCCG as a technical report, not a conference publication. But that is not solving the issue entirely. If people are just upfront about what they're doing, everyone can apply individual standards (eg, some people think ICALP is a top conference, others think it's not).
-
"But if you do talk numbers, get them right, and don't tell me I'm a quasi-loser for not having a PhD+tenure by this age."
I guess what he meant is that you cannot be considered a "standard" undergraduate student, not because you are 24, but because, when you started at MIT, you already had extensive hard-core training in computer science in general and algorithms in particular.
So, you had a huge advantage wrt your peers and could start doing research right away.
-
So what do you think about somebody who publishes 30%+ of papers in STOC/FOCS/SODA? He's a guy with good intentions, but not God, so he of course can't always get perfect results
I think it is ridiculous you can ask this question on numbers alone. It illustrates your obsession with numbers. Here's a person who has 30% of his papers in STOC/FOCS/SODA: Stephen Cook. Perhaps you've heard of him?
What do you think of a guy with 80% of the papers in CCCG/ISAAC/COCOON/...? He's a guy who would only think of an important problem by accident; his usual style is to invent minor things and generate publications.
Same thing. What are the other 20% of his/her papers? Solutions to major conjectures or technical contributions to the topic du jour? One cannot judge without looking at the papers.
-
I think it is ridiculous you can ask this question on numbers alone. It illustrates your obsession with numbers. Here's a person who has 30% of his papers in STOC/FOCS/SODA: Stephen Cook. Perhaps you've heard of him?
Actually, it seems that if you count the right way, and look at the percentage of Cook's conference papers that appear in STOC/FOCS, it is a whopping 77%.
-
Actually, I think that was supposed to be the good case. Cook would be a "guy with good intentions, but not God"
-
I do not think one should judge the merit of a paper solely by the conference it appears in. There are many FOCS/STOC papers which have been consigned to oblivion once published and there have been numerous papers in the so-called lower ranked conferences which have been widely read and cited.
-
Extremists ruin everything. Let me try to condense this: If I want an indicator which (1) has small complexity and (2) is highly correlated with research quality, then the clear choice IMNSHO is # FOCS/STOC publications/year of research.
Is it perfect? Of course not. Should it be used to compare two particular people? No. Is it highly correlated with research quality as I (and many others) would judge it? Yes. Of all measures with comparable correlation, does it have the smallest description? Yes.
Is it useful for anything? Probably not.
-
Is it highly correlated with research quality as I (and many others) would judge it? Yes
Not clear. A lot of people would rather have one really high quality result a year than three mediocre STOC/FOCS publications a year. I don't know about you, but I would consider a person who does the former a more successful researcher.
-
It seems that either the imposters above do not care for being exposed, or TCS is really full of morons.
-
FOCS/STOC are good conferences for hot subjects in the algorithmic-complexity branches of computer science. That is:
1. Hot current subjects have clear preference;
2. If a paper is not algorithmic-complexity oriented it will not be accepted due to relevance.
Therefore, FOCS/STOC is a too narrow venue that cannot be taken seriously as a scientific quality measure for TCS.
In order to evaluate scientific achievements in the long run, FOCS/STOC measure is clearly irrelevant.
Of course, I'm not talking about ad-hoc, short term measures, that might be proper for the mediocre level of scientific research. For such ends, these kind of simple instruments to measure quality of research might work.
-
This year MIT is amazing in the number of accepted papers. Is there any one from Cornell or Berkeley (I see at least one from CMU and one from Stanford)?
Which is the CMU paper? Are you counting Ryan O'Donnell?
-
Is there any doubt about that a JACM paper is much more prestigious than FOCS/STOC papers? Usually, only the the best paper award winner gets invited to JACM (not into a special issue, just a regular issue). So in this case, just STOC/FOCS is not the only issue.
-
I am curious. What is the difference between a special issue paper and a regular issue paper, say, on SICOMP or JCSS? Generally speaking, which is more prestigious?
-
Fun fact: The last three FOCS PC's have not had any MIT members ... it must be some kind of a record.
-
"which is more prestigious?"
"most papers in FOCS.."
"numbers *are* important"
"have more STOC/FOCS papers than him"
It is a great promise for the further advancement of the very serious branch of science called TCS to see that researchers in the field spend most of their energy on the deepest and most important questions.
Guys, keep up the good work!!
-
then the clear choice IMNSHO is # FOCS/STOC publications/year of research.
It is curious that this post follows a discussion in which it was highlighted that crypto people (for whatever reason) tend not to publish in FOCS/STOCS. Neither do logic and machine learning people, who prefer COLT, and some have argued that similar self-selection takes place with computational geometry and SOCG. I know of people with several STOC/FOCS papers that self-select and submit most of their algorithm papers to SODA for the simple reason that the intended audience regularly attended SODA, but not STOC/FOCS.
Yes, we do need quick and dirty measures of quality to compute promotions, grants, etc. However it is possible to be too quick and too dirty. The h-index is one such shorthand, the STOC/FOCS index is only slightly quicker but it's way dirtier.
-
Who are the machine learning people who write papers that would be applicable to FOCS/STOC? I get the impression that the mathy ML papers read like statistics papers, not necessarily TCS papers, and the less mathy ones belong in AI journals.
-
My guess is that the folks who say that what is important is quality, not numbers of pubilcations in FOCS/STOC/Whatever, at least have jobs, and more likely have tenure. I have a hard time telling my PhD students to not worry about so much about numbers, when as best as I can tell, in the short term, numbers are very important.
-
It's amazing that in such a group of supposedly smart people, the concept of "correlation" is so misunderstood. Your reactions are similar to the idiots who were deeply offended by Bill Bennett's comments last year, when the Guardian ran a story entitled "Abort all black babies and cut crime, says Republican."
When someone suggests that # of F/S papers is correlated with research quality, it is idiotic to make an objection of the form: "What about Professor A, that would mean he sucks, right?" It is also silly to posit cause and effect (e.g. being male is correlated with research quality as well), and finally such a statement does not endorse any course of action based on this correlation.
In the end, I think the whole point was that there are sects of TCS researchers for which the goal is to publish as much as possible, as often as possible, without ever making (or even trying to make) really significant contributions, and the F/S metric tends to weed those people out.
-
Who are the machine learning people who write papers that would be applicable to FOCS/STOC?
Just about the entire COLT conference, in my opinion. In fact, they used to publish in STOC/FOCS as well but as COLT came on to its own they moved away.
-
My guess is that the folks who say that what is important is quality,at least have jobs, and more likely have tenure.
You are missing the point. *Do* focus on numbers when planing your short term career goals or your interview goals. *Don't* focus on numbers when doing public comparisons of quality as you only look foolish in the process.
-
It's amazing that in such a group of supposedly smart people, the concept of "correlation" is so misunderstood.
We understand correlation quite well, thank you very much. The point we are making is that the correlation is too weak to make a blanket statement such "as Mihai is ahead of Erik because he has more F/S papers" as Mihai said tongue in cheek. For an index to be a good measure it has to have high correlation with what is trying to measure. The F/S index mismeasures all cryptographers, logic people (theory B), learning people, algorithms people, and computational geometers. It also overmeasures people who are trend chasers, always publishing irrelevant results in the hot topic du jour.
-
The F/S index mismeasures all cryptographers, logic people (theory B), learning people, algorithms people, and computational geometers.
I disagree with all of these except for logic. Just choosing some favorite cryptographers, e.g. Goldwasser, Goldreich, Micali; they are not underpredicted by F/S counting. The case for (theoretical) learning, algorithms, and computational geometers is even stronger.
-
I disagree with all of these except for logic. Just choosing some favorite cryptographers, e.g. Goldwasser, Goldreich, Micali; they are not underpredicted by F/S counting.
Huh? Micali has a grand total of eight F/S papers in the last sixteen years (1990-2005), or about the same as any of a constellation of moderately accomplished non-cryto researchers. Goldreich has published less than 10% of his papers in F/S in the last ten years (1996-2005), which doesn't even clear half of the 20% threshold suggested by Mihai.
-
My guess is that the folks who say that what is important is quality, at least have jobs, and more likely have tenure.
Here's another option: these are the people who are not getting published in FOCS/STOC.
Instead of facing their incompetence, they romanticize it. "It's not that my work is mediocre, or that I'm slow. I'm just working on the really important problems."
But someone like Mihai forces such people to face reality. Hence, the emotional responses seen in the comments here.
Spend less time flaming Mihai and concentrate on doing excellent research. (Which, let's face it, will get you in FOCS/STOC.)
-
Goldreich has published less than 10% of his papers in F/S in the last ten years (1996-2005), which doesn't even clear half of the 20% threshold suggested by Mihai.
You're dumb.
In the last 10 years, Oded has published 38% of his conference papers in F/S. By your count, if Oded puts his papers on ECCC and sends them to a journal, then the highest percentage he could achieve is 33%.
-
Come on. Goemans has 8 papers in F/S and Ravi has 12 papers in F/S in their whole life. By your standards these very top algorithmic people should be almost like Mihai. Doesn't it seem stupid? It is clear that F/S is more for complexity and more generaly lower bounds than algorithms or upper bounds. These people have around 14 SODA papers each.
-
Just a note: Patrascu is not the only author of most of his publications.
-
So, "top" conferences like FOCS/STOC are worshipped, and any doubt about whether the number of publication there reflect one's ability will be labled as blasphemy..... and blasphemy has a new name in the 21st century: "sour grape". OK, so let's have a little more blasphemy by looking at the following long time doubts I have about the holy peer-review process in these worshipped conferences:
1) By "top" conferences, we usually mean "general" conferences that cover many areas of a bigger field (like FOCS/STOC). As a result of this generality, submissions to these conferences are possibly reviewed by people of greatly varying background. Ideally, this means the work are evaluated by their value to the entire field, instead of how important it is to a very specific area. However, we can also phrase this as how well can the reviewer understand and appreciate the work, and what is his attitude to people/research in the particular area. Remember that some (if not all, in the worst case) of the reviewers can be non-expert to the specific topic involved. For one thing, experts for particular areas may be of limited supply, and even if there are plenty of them, they may already be assigned too many papers, and I truly have no idea how this assignment is done. Random? Or work of particular "interest" got assigned reviewers that are less likely to return gibberish comments?
Furthermore, I believe work that addresses fundamental issues with a
novel approach, which can have significant, long lasting impact to the field, can only be appreciated by those with profound knowledge of the specific area. And what will the fate of these work be in a "top" conference if
the author is from some school you've never heard of, if the PC chair did not pay attention when assigning reviewers? This paper may got one 4 (or even 5) from one reviewer, and then two 1 or 2 from the non-experts who don't really know what's the big deal about the work, where is the novelty.
The conclusion is, submissions to these "top" conferences may not be
evaluated by how well they fit into the big picture, but how well they fit into the small part of the big picture known to the reviewers assigned. I believe, this is making the fate of a paper submitted to these "top" conferences "random".
2) If you have been in research long enough, I suppose you should have heard of, or even have personal encounters with the "Mafias": powerful schools/individuals who have some say in PCs of some "top" conferences, and who are seen to have underserved advantage in this peer review process. If you haven't, I suggest you ask around, you should get some positive feedback before you ask the 10th person. I think many supposedly suffering from the "sour grape" symptoms will notice, some papers accepted by these top conferences would never be accepted if they
come from somebody studying in some unkownn schools. I have some personal experience with these "Mafias", I know friends who talk about them, and I know people who have been in the PC of "top" conferences admit their existence.
The conclusion to the second point is, the peer review process is random to some, and pretty certain for some others.
If you read all the shit above to this point, I suppose you either agree with me a lot (or you'll have lost patience and skip to the next post), or totally disagree (so you are only reading to pen up a longer message attacking mine). But, as scientists(supposedly ..... didn't we call our departments Computer Sciences?), I challenge you guys to come up with scientific ways of resolving our disputes, and design experiments to verify whether this "random" process that roots from the lack of understanding or appreciation of the reviewers, and this unfair process due to the Mafia exist. To confirm, or refute through experiments, instead of "arguments" the claim that these "top" conferences are good measures the quality of one's work, that good work, and good work alone, will get in. How?
All we need is a repository of the reviews for different rejected
submissions to these top conferences, together with the submitted work. Both should be authenticated (the reviews really come from the PC of the conference involved, the submission is really submitted, and tied to the reviews), and concealed by encryption so that only the author can make the information public when he's willing to (possibly after the work involved is published, or given up). Through these stored, and revealed reviews, we can see whether the unknowledgable reviewers that I have talked of exist. By comparing the rejected work with those accepted by the same conference
at the same year, and applying those reasons for which the rejected got its fate on those accepted, we can see whether the double standard I have talked of exists.
Yes, this is in fact a mechanism to evaluate the well worshipped peer review process. And we do need an evaluation and monitoring mechanism. We should keep in mind that, anything left in the hands of humans, unchecked, unchallenged, will certainly be abused, either for convenience (it's sometimes quite tiring to do the right thing), or for personal benefits. This will require certain extra work by those organizing conferences. But I think people in the community should force it on those organizing conferences, to make sure that their top conferences deserve the reputation, and the "nobody" are not wasting their time so that those "somebody" can put "acceptance rate: 1%" on their publication list.
-
"Here's another option: these are the people who are not getting published in FOCS/STOC."
Why not face another reality: F/S is just a small part of CS. They do not have a monopoly on what is best in CS research, and not even TCS. In the last years, the lack of representation from other streams of CS has been noted, and only a few groups (mostly from Ivy League schools) are present there (to keep their prestige).
Given this situation, it is not surprising that some top researchers don't have many papers there. Trying to reinterpret the reality as you did above just shows how narrow is your vision.
-
I think we are getting something upside-down here: it is not good conferences that give "prestige" to papers by accepting them, it is good papers that give prestige to the conferences they appear in.
STOC/FOCS did not become important conferences because a committee (or an anonymous online discussion) so decided, they became important because that's where most of the memorable theory work has appeared so far. Similarly SODA has become an important conference because good papers appear there every year. FOCS/STOC would become even more important if "mathy ML" papers and "logic in computer science" papers appeared there. And, as a fan of S/F, it would make me very happy if this were the case (especially for the "mathy ML").
So if a good paper is rejected from (or not submitted to) a conference, it is the conference that is harmed not the paper. The quality of the paper, and the likelyhood that it will become a seminal result, or the fact that it settles an important question, or the chances if will help its author get a job, are just the same if it is a technical report or if it appears in JACM.
So: (1) be proud of your results, not your numbers; (2) if you have great results, please send them to STOC/FOCS, and share some of your glory with my favorite conferences.
-
Here's another option: these are the people who are not getting published in FOCS/STOC.
This is usually the last cop out of the "STOC/FOCS are perfect" crowd.
When presented with ample evidence that these two conferences, while undoubtly of high quality, are not the end-all and be all of TCS, they resort to taunts such as "sour grapes".
Very mature, and very rational.
-
An ode to FOCS/STOC...
I love myself
I want you to love me
When I'm feeling down
I want you above me
I search myself
I want you to find me
I forget myself
I want you to remind me
I don't want anybody else
When I think about you I touch myself
-
Just a note: Patrascu is not the only author of most of his publications.
Neither is Erik Demaine! What a couple of slackers.
-
The STOC/FOCS program committees consist of a representative set of respected researchers in theoretical computer science, and they do the best they can to select the most interesting papers among the submissions. The choices are not perfect, but I can't imagine how to do it better. If STOC/FOCS did not exist, I would focus on SODA, not have time to keep up with what's happening in the other conferences, and major breakthroughs in Complexity or other areas of TCS would happen without my being even vaguely aware of them. We are very lucky as a field to have this bi-yearly snapshot of recent research.
Perhaps Patrascu can serve as an example of an extremely successful education, and as inspiration for ideas on how to educate the next generation. Again, we are lucky that such a talented young researcher has chosen TCS as his field.
-
The choices are not perfect, but I can't imagine how to do it better.
Oh please. While I commend the work PCs do, it is not hard to come up with improvements:
First, increase the size of the PC to ensure broad coverage of TCS both in areas and in geographic regions. Of course stronger regions and areas would still have bigger representation.
Second, enlarge the definition of what is a good paper to include more than just "highly technical complexity/lower bound/trend-ish content" results. Looking back it seems that the top 25% papers submitted will get in regardless of their complexity/lower bound-ish content. It is the next batch of the papers where the conference seems to traditionally prefer technical difficulty/trendiness over other measures such as long term impact, relevance, applicability, etc.
Third, move FOCS back to parallel sessions. Having such a small acceptance rate magnifies errors while minimally increasing quality.
I'm sure there are more. Those are the ones at the top of my head.
-
"relevance, applicability, etc".
That got a laugh out of me. Basically that's your way of trying to get trivial and useless results given the same importance as non-trivial ones. Good luck with that!
-
My God, imagine all the good work we could all be doing if we weren't spending so much time on this.
FOCS/STOC/SODA/ICALP are by no means perfect. But, if you get good results, and communicate them to the leaders of your field, they will be appreciated whether or not they have been published in the conference you would have liked. In particular, this will lead to getting good letters of recommendation, which are weighted as much or more by hiring committees than the number of papers you have in top conferences.
-
That got a laugh out of me. Basically that's your way of trying to get trivial and useless results given the same importance as non-trivial ones. Good luck with that!
I said applicable results, you said useless. I said relevant results, you said trivial. It seems reading is not your forte.
-
"Relevant" and "Applicable" are hopelessly vague terms on their own. Relevant to what? Applicable to what? You don't say. And in a field such as ours, one needs to be especially precise when using these terms...
If you mean "making an appreciable difference in the real world", then I agree that work of that kind is very valuable. But I think such results are much rarer than technical advances. What is very common is to see people making vague claims (being precise is to their disadvantage) about the "relevance" of their work when said work has nothing to recommend it.
-
>I'm a quasi-loser for not having a PhD+tenure by this age.
This is plain stupid. What about expanding your horizon and deflating your ego? A good point to start:
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/humftp/E-text/Russell/knowledg.htm
(Knowledge and Wisdom, Bertrand Russell)
-
Another issue about FOCS/STOC: It happened for me a lot that I had a very good paper a month or two after FOCS deadline. Then it appears one of co-authors is in the PC of next STOC. Then essentially you are forced to submit the paper to SODA, otherwise you need to wait for another year and even then there is no guarantee that the paper gets accepted to FOCS in the first try. This was a real issue for me and I think even for job markets, only counting F/S and ignoring SODA papers is not a good metric.
-
Good point about the PC conflicts. I now that at least two people who declined PC membership in SODA because they had several good results hatching. There is at least one oher person who didn't decline (and would have accepted even in hindsight), but still felt he had to apologize to all of his pending collaborators for shunting them that year from SODA.
-
This is plain stupid.
Give him a break - he's young, PLUS, he's at MIT: what do you expect? MIT is about producing papers, not about gaining wisdom.
-
I close my eyes
And see you before me
Think I would die
If you were to ignore me
A fool could see
Just how much I adore you
I get down on my knees
I'd do anything for you
I don't want anybody else
When I think about you I touch myself
-
So much bitterness. This cannot be good for our community!
Some thoughts to cheer everyone up: I think that the "mafias" mentioned earlier may exist, but they don't form around selfish goals, but rather around research threads that they find thought-provoking. Instead of harboring bitterness and calling them names, I think that it is much more constructive to try to copy them and spread the excitement.
This is not a zero-sum game, and other researchers are not the enemy! I honestly believe that everyone in this community has the intellectual curiousity to fall in love with research ideas that truly are novel, insightful, and important.
-
This is not a zero-sum game, and other researchers are not the enemy! I honestly believe that everyone in this community has the intellectual curiousity to fall in love with research ideas that truly are novel, insightful, and important.
The spirit of this is true.
But let's also face the fact that not everyone is equal and not everyone produces the same quality of work, and we have a lot of process and metrics to judge that.
In the end, some people don't finish their PhD. Others don't get jobs. Other don't get tenure, and so on.
While there are brilliant people in all of the above categories, they --- like the seminal results that got rejected from top conferences --- are the exception and not the rule.
Discussion is great, but people should be aware where they are coming from. That is, if they can.
-
About crypto. Nobody --- may be except the people working at MIT/Weizmann --- in cryptography counts the number of papers in FOCS/STOC. Those conferences are seen --- from the viewpoint of cryptography --- irrelevant. True, major crypto papers in 80s were published in FOCS/STOC, and sometimes a major paper is published there even nowadays.
The reason is that only papers from a tiny fraction --- those of very theoretical kind --- of crypto get ever published in FOCS/STOC, while crypto is much much wider. It is applicable, and people care about practicality of constructions, exactness of reductions, they do cryptanalysis of existing schemes etc.
Instead of FOCS/STOC papers cryptographers count Eurocrypt/Crypto papers. But also this is controversial and not correct. Those people who work in symmetric crypto tend to instead publish at FSE, and in fact may never attend Eurocrypt/Crypto, considering most of the papers there too theoretical or just noninteresting.
The point: counting FOCS/STOC papers for a cryptographer is utterly irrelevant (it just shows you do a particular kind of cryptography). But of course counting any kind of papers is irrelevant. Do you know how many papers does Diffie have? But you know his name, no?
-
The point: counting FOCS/STOC papers for a cryptographer is utterly irrelevant (it just shows you do a particular kind of cryptography).
Dude, we are talking about theoretical computer science, and by implication --- about the theory of cryptography.
Systems people also don't count STOC/FOCS publications. Neither do Chemists. Really.
-
Dude, we are talking about theoretical computer science, and by implication --- about the theory of cryptography.
I think you are the one who is missing the point. What Helgar meant is that theory of cryptography is much broader than what gets published in FOCS and STOC, so even theoretical cryptographers don't count FOCS/STOC papers.
-
Examples of theory of cryptography never published in FOCS:
- construction of (say) short signature schemes without random oracles
- feasibility analysis of algebraic/differential/... attacks on block ciphers
- security analysis of triple encryption/modes of encryption
- ...
What is theory? If somebody comes up with a new factoring/disc log algorithm then it's a major theoretical result, but I've almost never seen cryptanalytic results in FOCS/STOC. (Except if it is quantum.)
