Thursday, August 16, 2007

HotTheory Workshop?

This year marked the 11th HotOS workshop. From the call for papers:
We request submissions of position papers that propose new directions of research, advocate nontraditional approaches to old (or new) ideas, or generate insightful discussion... As a venue for exploring new ideas, HotOS encourages contributions influenced by other fields such as hardware design, networking, economics, social organizations, biological systems, and the impact of compiler developments on systems and vice versa. We particularly look for position papers containing highly original ideas.
Submissions were just due for the sixth HotNets workshop. Here is the HotNets mission statement:
The Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets) was created in 2002 to discuss early-stage, creative networking research and to debate positions that reflect on the research direction and needs of the broad networking community. Architecture, high-level design work, and positions that may shape long-term research direction are especially welcome. HotNets is structured to work in synergy with conferences such as SIGCOMM by providing a venue in which innovative work may receive feedback to help it mature into conference papers or otherwise have a long-term impact on the community. To fulfill these goals HotNets calls for short position papers that argue a thoughtful point-of-view rather than full-length conference papers, and maintains a broad and diverse scope.
Does theory need a Hot Workshop? A workshop specifically designed for somewhat wacky or not-fully-baked ideas that may turn into long-range research directions?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does theory need a Hot Workshop? A workshop specifically designed for somewhat wacky or not-fully-baked ideas that may turn into long-range research directions?

Yes on both counts. Coincidentally Scott Aaronson's FOCS'36 refers to this need. A solid technical contribution such as the fictional “A 7/6+ε Integrality Gap for Optimal Distribution of Gutta-Percha to the Colonies” would likely be preferred over a breakthrough paper which might be light on the techniques but with far reaching implications such as Turing's computability paper.

We should follow on the success of HotNets and start a HotTheory (or HotAlCom) conference.

Alex Lopez-Ortiz

Anonymous said...

I don't agree -- argument by hyperbole doesn't convince me. The hot theory conference would hardly be filled with breakthrough papers like Turing's, and in fact would be lucky to get even one such paper.

Anonymous said...

and in fact would be lucky to get even one such paper.

If you are correct, then theory is in a very dire state indeed. Essentially you are claiming that theory produces at most one non-technical insight a year.

If you look at the proceedings of HotOS and HotNets you can see that somehow Operating Systems and Networks manage a lot more than one a year.

Anonymous said...

Essentially you are claiming that theory produces at most one non-technical insight a year.

No, Turing's paper is a lot better than that. One can debate whether operating systems or networks have ever produced a paper of that level of quality. (I don't mean that as an insult to those fields. The number of such papers in all of CS is surely a one-digit number, and arguably 1.)

I strongly believe a Hot Workshop would be bad for theory. We've already got too much hype and trend following; we don't need a new workshop specifically designed to encourage that. I don't want to name names, but when I think about the people I know in the field who would be be tempted to submit "position papers containing highly original ideas", let alone "wacky or not-fully-baked ideas", I shudder to think of the results. Maybe Scott Aaronson would submit something amusing, and that could be entertaining, but I can think of some other people who already spend way too much time hyping their vision of the future of the field.

Anonymous said...

We've already got too much hype and trend following; we don't need a new workshop specifically designed to encourage that.

It seems you are misunderstanding what HotNets is about. It is certainly *not* about hype. The papers tend to be more about outlandish ideas (or germ of ideas, to use Steve Jobs turn of phrase). Here's the relevant quote from the call for papers:

We encourage submissions of early work, with novel and interesting ideas, across the broad range of networking systems research. Work introduced at HotNets-V, once fully thought through, completed, and written up in a finished form, may be relevant to conferences such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, SOSP, OSDI, SenSys, or MobiCom, or may have not yet found a home in the current spectrum of networking systems conferences.

Then you go on to say:

but when I think about the people I know in the field who would be be tempted to submit "position papers containing highly original ideas", let alone "wacky or not-fully-baked ideas", I shudder to think of the results.

which is a red-herring. The Hot* workshops are refereed, and if certain papers are shudder inducing then they would be duly rejected by the PC.

Anonymous said...

(I'm the second to last anonymous.)

The Hot* workshops are refereed, and if certain papers are shudder inducing then they would be duly rejected by the PC.

I'm skeptical about the refereeing (all CS theory conference refereeing seems shoddy to me), or whether they would filter for the same things I would. However, I agree that I may be misunderstanding the role Hot workshops play in other areas.

If the workshops serve as a forum for unconventional work that may not fit into any other conference, then they sound useful. If they serve as a forum for people to pose as visionaries without having to back things up with impressive results (because it is supposed to be incomplete work), then that's a problem.

My gut feeling is that this is less necessary for theory than for some other areas, because it is easier to recognize good theory based on just the presentation in a research paper. The only serious counterargument I can think of is zero-knowledge proofs. I'm told that in the 1980's, the original ZKP paper was rejected from a number of conferences. In hindsight it would have been the most important paper at most of those conferences. I'd guess that this was a fluke, and there aren't any profound papers floating around unable to find a home at any good conference, but who knows?

Anonymous said...

Overall, theory is a lot less conservative about new research ideas and directions than systems areas (after all, our work doesn't get assessed with the criteria "can you possibly build it?" or "how does this fit in with deployed systems?"). I don't think that this usual rationale would be the reason to have a HotTheory workshop.

However, what would be great would be some kind of venue for people outside of theory who have some half-baked theoretical questions related to their systems (or other) problems.