The ICS folks didn't make life easy for themselves by explicitly stating that they wanted "conceptual contributions". But looking over the list of papers, a few things come to mind:
- It's a great list of papers. Nothing to complain about really, and any of these could have been a credible paper at FOCS/STOC
- The Arora et al paper on designing derivatives using NP-hard problems has already received so much chatter, one might argue that the conference mandate has already been satisfied. Similarly for the quantum money followup.
- Even if the whole 'conceptual contributions' thing doesn't pan out, I see no harm in having a third conference inserted between FOCS and STOC - the more the merrier.
- I guess innovation = "game theory + crypto + quantum + misc" :)
Update: Shiva Kintali has PDFs for the accepted papers.
...and any of these could have been a credible paper at FOCS/STOC
ReplyDeleteI disagree, although this may just prove the organizers point about ICS relative to FOCS/STOC.
I know for a fact that some of these papers were rejected from earlier FOCS/STOC. Looking at some of the papers, it's not hard to see why: many of the papers are "fringe" ideas that are not going to go anywhere (quantum money?) except possibly to generate more papers, or uninteresting results augmented with lots of technicalities. Only some subset of the papers (the Arora one being among them) are both conceptually interesting and deep. I would say the overall quality looks closer to ICALP.
A side note. 8 of the 12 PC members have papers at the conference. This is a departure from the theory "norm".... Is this something we'd like to have happen in other theory conferences as well?
ReplyDeleteNo. Absolutely not.
I suspect the fact that 20% of the papers are written by PC members helps explain why, as you put it, "innovation = game theory + crypto + quantum + misc". There are definitely a few gems here, but I was really hoping for a LOT more "misc".
Also, no comp geometry at all (at least that I noticed). I maintain that a double blind system would have reinforced their dedication to innovation over name recognition (just to beat a dead horse...).
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, Sorelle, I don't know how many (if any) comp geom papers were submitted, and it's not even clear what kinds of comp. geom papers would make sense in this broad context.
ReplyDelete...and any of these could have been a credible paper at FOCS/STOC
ReplyDeleteI agree. May be not "any", but many of them can be creditable FOCS/STOC papers. In fact, I am impressed by the list of papers and the abstracts. It is no way close to ICALP.
#anon 1: I also know of a few papers that got rejected from STOC, but made into FOCS. Not all the papers in STOC/FOCS leave a mark. I don't understand, how someone can comment that many of the papers are on fringe ideas, when "many" of them are not yet publicly available. Probably you don't have a paper in ICS. Get a life and try to appreciate new things that are good.
I appreciate how anonymous number one can predict the future and so can separate out ideas that will and will not be useless in the future. I look forward to his or her paper on how this is done.
ReplyDeleteI submitted a comment on the quantum money paper. Please don't post it. Whatever my thoughts, I shouldn't be bad-mouthing papers on the web. Sorry.
ReplyDeletewould say the overall quality looks closer to ICALP.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Indeed, it's very impressive that the first meeting of this new conference managed to be as good as the best TCS conference in Europe, and one of the best in the wrold, i.e., ICALP.