I will join in the collective sighs of relief at the completion of yet another deadline. I'd like to officially grumble about anonymous submission procedures, because one of the few pleasures of completing a paper is being able to brag about it afterwards :), and not everyone is as enlightened as the IACR.
Anyhoo, here's what I dispatched to the annual sausage convention. No pdf yet alas, because of paper release procedures and the like.
Lance had an interesting post about why he became a computer scientist: it appears that his story (and that of many in the comments) is of someone with a strong math background ending up in a math program and moving to a computer science program (one commenter even cites a complaint among math profs about losing their students to physics and CS). My story was slightly different: after reading Stephen Hawking's 'Brief History of Time' I was convinced that I wanted to be a physicist. My main interaction with computers was as a hacker, writing video games (in assembly code to boot) on my dinky ZX Spectrum.
But then I found a book in the library (actually it was the British Council Library in New Delhi, for any Delhiites among you all) that talked about Alan Turing and the Turing test. It was a short hop, skip and jump from there to Searle's Chinese Room argument, strong AI, and Godel's Theorem. AI was my hook into computer science, and remained my major interest up through graduation, although a complexity theory class by Somenath Biswas (and a thesis under his supervision) started drawing me away from the "fuzziness" of AI and into TCS itself. Through all of this, I remained untouched by the "math bug" (though I always enjoyed it), and for the last many years have been playing a desperate game of catchup !
From the point of view of training, I'd argue that a math degree is indispensable, and I fervently wish I had gone that route. My meanderings through AI did give me a more "romantic" notion of the field though, which is not necessarily a bad thing :)
Anonymous submission procedure? Why are you not allowed to brag about the paper??
ReplyDeletePosted by Anonymous
Suresh says:
ReplyDeleteI'd like to officially grumble about anonymous submission procedures, because one of the few pleasures of completing a paper is being able to brag about it afterwards
You can still brag anonymously -- just pick a blog close to your area, and work your bragging comments about your anonymous submission into a cleverly crafted comment to some post. If you have the paper hosted somewhere (in a way that your ID will not be revealed by the URL), you can even include a link to it.
Posted by Anonymous
I'd like to officially grumble about anonymous submission procedures
ReplyDeletePersonally, I do not fully understand the rationale behind enforcing anonymity of submissions to "anonymous" conferences. Specifically, it seems to me that anonymity aims to prevent two types of behavior:
- "positive bias": you are my friend so your paper gets in
- "negative bias": I dont like you so I reject your paper
Problem is, positive bias is not eliminated at all via the anonymous submission process, since one can always tell his/her buddy about the paper using a "private channel". If anything, enforcing anonymity means limiting information flow to unbiased reviewers, so they are unable to counter the potential bias.
On the other hand, anonymous submissions can greatly help eliminating the negative bias - with a sufficient effort (and pain) one can really leave the reviewers wondering who wrote the paper (and, sometimes, why :). But the choice of this avenue can be left to the authors - if they dont wont to shield themselves from the potential of negative bias, that is their choice.
Altogether, a scenario that makes most sense to me is that anonymity is an option, but not a requirement.
(I am sure I did not invent this, so any pointers to relevant blogs etc are welcome)
Cheers,
Posted by Piotr
So you'd suggest that authors have the option of making their names anonymous when submitting ? interesting. It creates the "next level" of this game. If I am a reviewer who receives an anonymous paper, i can only infer that the author has pissed off someone on the committee (or is afraid of something).
ReplyDeleteMuch like taking the 5th, although not an admission of guilt, is often viewed that way :).
the reason I cited the IACR is that they recognized this, and allow authors to post eprints, requiring that the committees police themselves.
Posted by Suresh
Much like taking the 5th, although not an admission of guilt, is often viewed that way :).
ReplyDeleteGood point. But I guess one can let the "market" figure out the price of anonymity.
In particular, if few people use this option, we can as well eliminate it and go back to non-anonymous subs. Alternatively, if a sizeable fraction of submissions are anonymous, then the price of anonymity would be pretty low.
Given the popularity of anonymous postings on various blogs in our community(ies), I suspect anonymous submission would be a popular choice :)
Cheers,
Piotr
That would be an interesting experiment. Pity the STOC submission deadline is over :).
ReplyDeletepersonally I think people post anonymously on our community blogs because they are lazy, and blogger (used for mine, lance's and siva's blogs, among others) doesn't make it easy to post comments with a name if you don't already have an account.
Posted by Suresh
True. But lets not underestimate the fact that voicing strong opinions is safest when anonymous :)
ReplyDeletePiotr
Hmm. i'd like to agree with you, and then I read this .
ReplyDeleteat least he has tenure :)
Posted by Suresh