tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post2830790546057898952..comments2024-03-10T05:26:42.148-04:00Comments on My Biased Coin: Conference ReviewsMichael Mitzenmacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738274256402616703noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-17121717176752724922009-11-08T12:02:36.139-05:002009-11-08T12:02:36.139-05:00I'm trying to understand the difference betwee...I'm trying to understand the difference between conferences in CS and economics (my field). Are yours published? Our are more informal -- early ideas exposed to discussion -- so that might change things. Here are two approaches I've found interesting. (i) Do formal reviews (like those you described) and aggregate them somehow. (ii) Have a group of young people in the field do whatever they think best. In my experience, (ii) generates a much more interesting program.Dave Backushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11472846910681816429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-24792845343585761202009-11-04T23:11:21.213-05:002009-11-04T23:11:21.213-05:00Coming back to reviewing processes, I also am a fa...Coming back to reviewing processes, I also am a fan of the multiple round system, which focuses attention and reviewer time on where it is needed: on the upper ranked papers. Some conferences even have a third round (e.g., OSDI) and perhaps even a fourth. I once had an SOSP reject with 8 reviews.<br /><br />This approach is essentially taking the ranking approach to the ranking/rating debate in PC reviewing, which I agree with. The job of the PC is to determine what are the N top-ranked papers based on the pool of submissions they get.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-37552727576967286362009-11-03T13:10:05.037-05:002009-11-03T13:10:05.037-05:00Solving problems for problem's sake is mathema...<i><br />Solving problems for problem's sake is mathematics, solving them in a way that is relevant to CS is TCS.<br /></i><br /><br />In fact,to the contrary multiple proofs of the same theorem is quite highly valued in mathematics -- and there is usually no problem in publishing a different (even if more complicated) proof of a known theorem, if the new proof shows interesting connections to other areas. In TCS, it is a rare occurrence.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-7976549600767663712009-11-03T10:33:53.562-05:002009-11-03T10:33:53.562-05:00The LCA paper is also one of my favorites. It took...The LCA paper is also one of my favorites. It took a cryptic theoretical solution and made it practicable. <br /><br />Solving problems for problem's sake is mathematics, solving them in a way that is relevant to CS is TCS. The previous two versions made progress in the LCA problem but since they were not implemented by others they did not fully solve the TCS problem. They solved the math problem of proving that a solution exists <i>in theory</i>. The LCA paper proved that the solution exists in practice and countless implementations of the algorithm soon followed.Semihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17159946370871787967noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-86085728827889939932009-11-03T09:27:53.720-05:002009-11-03T09:27:53.720-05:00Anon #1 : Indeed, I'd have to say, I like the ...Anon #1 : Indeed, I'd have to say, I like the LCA paper for the clarity of the exposition. I found it so enjoyable, I ended up making it one of my last lectures for my undergraduate algorithms class. It brings back dynamic programming in interesting ways, gives a nice demonstration of offline setup cost/query cost/memory tradeoffs for data structures, and shows the power of a clever "recursive" argument. And combined with suffix trees (which I quickly go over on the last lecture) it allows for some pretty fun results. <br /><br />I'd be happy to see more papers like it. But then again, I regularly do things like write survey articles, so what do I know.Michael Mitzenmacherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02161161032642563814noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-48967550946317342662009-11-03T09:17:28.299-05:002009-11-03T09:17:28.299-05:00"The LCA Problem Revisited" is a curious..."The LCA Problem Revisited" is a curious choice as favourite paper. Their result is identical in terms of space and time complexity to that published already twice before. The specific technique they deploy to get the result was itself taken from O. Berkman, D. Breslauer, Z. Galil, B. Schieber, and U. Vishkin. Highly<br />parallelizable problems, STOC '89, as they say in the paper. The novelty and hance their contribution is almost entirely in the clarity of the exposition. This has indeed been very useful to researchers interested in this area but who were not keen to read the previous papers.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com