A #metoo testimonial that hits close to home...

This is a guest post by a colleague in the TCS community, a person I know. If you read other TCS blogs you might come across this there. This is by design. Please do read it. 

Every #MeToo story over the last several months has made me pause. My heart races and my concentration fails. The fact that the stories have largely focused on the workplace adds to my difficulty.

Do I speak out too?

I have shared a few stories with colleagues about things that have happened to me in school and at work. But these stories have been somewhat lighthearted events that have been easy to share without outing the perpetrators.

For example, I have told a story about a university employee telling me, in so many words, that I should be barefoot and pregnant and not in the office. What I didn't share is that the same employee, later that year -- despite the fact that our common boss knew about this story because I did indeed report it -- was awarded a best employee award. How do you think that made me feel? Like my experience didn't matter and that such comments are condoned by our department. Why didn't I share that information widely? Because I was worried that folks would then be able to figure out who the culprit was. And isn't that even worse? Shouldn't it be the sexist who is worried and not the woman who, yet again, is made to feel like she doesn't belong?

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Let me tangent a bit. For years I have not flown. Ostensibly I stopped flying because of the contribution to the climate crisis. When I travel, I go by train. It takes longer, but has been surprisingly pleasant. And when travel takes 3-4 times as long, you don't do it as often, further reducing your carbon footprint. Of course, that means that I don't go to conferences unless they are nearby.

But when I really think about it, is this really the reason I stopped going to conferences? A conference I would normally go to was held nearby a few years ago and I didn't go. Sure, I suffered a grievous injury two weeks before, but I hadn't even registered. I had planned to not go long before that injury.

So, really, why do I no longer attend conferences? Partly I don't feel that I need to anymore, now that I have tenure. When I stopped attending conferences, I was able to "coast into" tenure. Letter writers would remember me. I essentially stopped going to conferences and workshops as soon as I possibly could.

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Back to the beginning, or close to.

I was nervous at the first conference I attended as a graduate student. One of the reasons I was nervous was that I was athletic at the time and planned on daily runs while I was attending -- I was worried that it might be viewed as a waste of time. My advisor, who also went to the conference, found out about my athleticism and suggested we run together. This was a relief to me. That is, until we were running and he started talking about his lackluster sex life with his wife. I responded by picking up the pace and feigning an illness on the remaining days. On the last day of the conference we were out for dinner with a large group of people and dinner went late into the night. I excused myself, as I had a 4AM bus to catch. My advisor walked me out of the restaurant and awkwardly said something about wanting me to stay and that we should talk. I stuck to leaving, knowing that I needed some sleep before the long trip home the next day. He said we should talk when we were back in the office. Honestly, at the time I thought he was going to complain about my talk or my professional performance in some way. I worried about it all through the weekend until we met next. I brought it up at the end of our meeting, asking what he wanted to talk about, naively expecting professional criticism. When he said I must surely know, in a certain voice, I knew he wasn't talking about work. I feigned ignorance, and he eventually brushed it off and said not to worry. In the coming months, he would cancel meetings and otherwise make himself unavailable. After a half year I realized I wouldn't be able to be successful without having a supportive advisor and, despite first planning to quit grad school, found a new advisor and moved on. That former advisor barely made eye contact with me for the remainder of my time in graduate school.

Fast forward many years. I was at a small workshop as a postdoc. A senior and highly respected researcher invited me to dinner. I was excited at the opportunity to make a stronger connection that would hopefully lead to a collaboration. However, at dinner he made it very clear that this was not professional by reaching across the table and stroking my hands repeatedly. I don't even recall how I handled it. Perhaps I should have expected it -- a grad school friend of mine had a similar, and probably worse, interaction with this same researcher. Shortly after I got to my room at the hotel, my hotel room phone rang. It was him. He wanted to continue our conversation. I did not.

Perhaps a year later, still as a postdoc, I was at a party and a colleague from another university was there too. At the end of the party, we were alone. We flirted, mutually. Flirting led to kissing, kissing led to him picking me up in a way that asserted how much stronger he is than me, which led to my utter discomfort, which led to me saying no, stop, repeatedly. Which he didn't listen to. Which led to a calculation in my head. I could either resist and risk physical injury or I could submit. I chose to submit, without consent.

For the record, that is called rape.

For a long while, I suppressed it. I pretended in my own head that it didn't happen that way, that it was consensual. I even tried to continue working with him -- always in public places, mind you. The wall in my mind gradually broke down over the years until several years later, we were at the same workshop where the doors of the rooms didn't have locks. You could lock them from the inside, but not the outside. I remember worrying that he would be lurking in my room and took to making sure I knew where he was before I ventured back to sleep.

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So why would I continue to go to workshops and conferences when that is the environment I know I will face? Even if I felt safe, if 95% of the attendees are men, how many look at me as a colleague and how many look at me as a potential score? When I was going up for tenure, I thought long and hard about listing the senior-and-highly-respected researcher on a do-not-ask-for-a-letter list. But where would it stop? Do I include all the people who hit on me? All the people who stared at my breasts or commented on my body? All the people who I had been given clear signals that they didn't see me as a colleague and equal member of the research community, but as a woman meant to be looked at, hit on, touched inappropriately.

Should I have quit grad school when I had the chance? We all know it isn't any better in industry. Should I have pursued another discipline? No discipline, it seems, is immune to sexualization of women. But I think the situation is uniquely horrible in fields where there are so few women. At conferences in theoretical computer science, 5-10% of the attendees are women, as a generous estimate. The numbers aren't in women's favor. The chances that you will get hit on, harassed, assaulted are much higher. There is a greater probability that you will be on your own in a group of men. You can't escape working with men. It is next to impossible to build a career when you start striking men off your list of collaborators in such a field. That is not to say there aren't wonderful men to work with. There are many men in our field that I have worked with and turned to for advice and spent long hours with and never once had detected so much as a creepy vibe. But you can't escape having to deal with the many others who aren't good. When you meet someone at a conference, and they invite you for a drink or dinner to continue the conversation, how do you know that they actually want to talk about work, or at least treat you as they would any colleague? How do you make that decision?

I hung on until I no longer needed to go to conferences and workshops to advance my career to the stability of tenure. But surely my career going forward will suffer. My decision is also hard on my students, who go to conferences on their own without someone to introduce them around. It is hard on my students who can't, for visa difficulties, go to the international conferences that I am also unwilling to go to, so we roll the dice on the few domestic conferences they can go to.

And now I am switching fields. Completely. I went to two conferences last summer. The first, I brought the protective shield of my child and partner. The second, I basically showed up for my talk and nothing else. I wasn't interested in schmoozing. It'll be difficult, for sure, to establish myself in a new field without fully participating in the expected ways.

Is all this why I am switching fields? Not entirely, I'm sure, but it must have played a big role. If I enjoyed conferences as much as everyone else seems to, and didn't feel shy about starting new collaborations, I might be too engrossed to consider reasons to leave. And certainly, the directions I am pursuing are lending themselves to a much greater chance of working with women.

Why am I speaking out now? The #MeToo moment is forcing me to think about it, of course. But I have been thinking about this for years. I hope it will be a relief to get it off my chest. I have been "getting on with it" for long enough. 1 in 5 women will deal with rape in their lifetime. 1 in 5! You would think that I would hear about this from friends. But I hadn't told anyone about my rape. And almost no one has told me about theirs. I think it would help, in the very least therapeutically, to talk about it.

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I thought about publishing this somewhere, anonymously, as a "woman in STEM". I considered publishing it non-anonymously, but was shy to deal with the trolls. I didn't want to deal with what many women who speak out about their experiences face: have their life be scrutinized, hear excuses being made on behalf of the predators, generally have their experiences denied. But I think by posting it here, many people in theoretical computer science will read it, rather than a few from the choir. I am hoping that you will talk to each other about it. That you will start thinking of ways to make our community better for others. In all my years of going to conferences and workshops, of all the inappropriate comments and behaviors that others have stood around and witnessed, never once did any of the good ones call that behavior out or intervene. Maybe they did so in private, but I think it needs to be made public. Even the good ones can do better.

What can you do?

While you couldn't have protected me from being raped, you can think about the situations we are expected to be in for our careers -- at workshops in remote locations, where we're expected to drink and be merry after hours. I hope not many of us have been raped by a colleague, but even if you haven't, it doesn't take many instances of being hit on or touched inappropriately to begin to feel unsafe.

I remember being at a conference and, standing in a small group, an attendee interrupted a conversation I was having to tell me that my haircut wasn't good, that I shouldn't have cut my hair short. I tried to ignore it, and continue my conversation, but he kept going on about it. Saying how I would never attract a man with that haircut. No one said anything. Speak up. Just say -- shut up! -- that's not appropriate. Don't leave it up to the people who have to deal with this day in day out to deal with it on their own. Create a culture where we treat each other with respect and don't silently tolerate objectification and worse.

I regret never reporting my first graduate advisor's behavior, but is it my fault? I had no idea who to report it to. I had no idea either in undergrad who I would report such behavior to. Where I am now is the first place I've been that has had clear channels for reporting sexual harassment and other damaging situations. The channels are not without problems, but I think the university is continuing to improve them. Perhaps we should have a way of reporting incidents in our field. I have a hard time believing, given that myself and a grad school friend had similar experiences with the same senior-and-highly-respected researcher, that others in the field don't know that he is a creep. It is up to you to protect the vulnerable of our community from creeps and predators. Keep an eye on them. Talk to them. Don't enable them. As a last resort, shame and isolate them.

STOC 2017 as a theory festival

Over on Windows on Theory, there's a solid discussion going on about possible changes to the format for STOC 2017 to make it more of a 'theory festival'. As Michael Mitzenmacher exhorts, please do go and comment there: this is a great chance to influence the form of our major conferences, and you can't make a change (or complain about the lack of change) if you're not willing to chime in.

I posted my two comment there, and you should go and read number one  and number two. Two things that I wanted to pull out and post here are in the form of a 'meta-suggestion':

1. Promise to persist with the change for a few years. Any kind of change takes time to get used to, and every change feels weird and crazy till you get used to it, after which point it’s quite natural. 

Case in point: STOC experimented one year with a two-tier committee, but there was no commitment to stick to the change for a few years, and I’m not sure what we learned at all from one data point (insert joke about theorists not knowing how to run experiments). 

Another case in point: I’m really happy about the continued persistence with workshops/tutorials. It’s slowly becoming a standard part of STOC/FOCS, and that’s great. 

2. Make a concerted effort to collect data about the changes. Generate surveys, and get people to answer them (not as hard as one might think). Collect data over a few years, and then put it all together to see how the community feels. In any discussion (including this one right here), there are always a few people with strong opinions who speak up, and the vast silent majority doesn’t really chip in. But surveys will reach a larger crowd, especially people who might be uncomfortable engaging in public.

STOC 2015 Call for Workshops and Tutorials

I've had two week from hell with proposal deadlines, paper deadlines, faculty candidates and ever-more demanding hungry cries of the baby chickadees  meetings with my students.

Thankfully, all that is now in the past and I can sally forth to the next deadline. Which is, you ask ?

STOC 2015 will have a workshops and tutorials day on Sunday June 14, the day before the conference starts. +Sanjeev Khanna and +Chandra Chekuri are running the event, and they want your proposals.

We invite groups of interested researchers to submit workshop or tutorial proposals. The goal of a workshop is to provide an informal forum for researchers to discuss important research questions, directions, and challenges. Connections between theoretical computer science and other areas, topics that are not well represented at STOC, and open problems are encouraged as workshop topics. Organizers are completely free to choose their workshop formats (invited speakers, panel discussions, etc.). The program for June 14th may also involve tutorials, each consisting of 1-2 survey talks on a particular area, and we welcome tutorial proposals as well.

Deadline for submissions is Mar 15, 2015. For more details on the format etc, visit the workshops/tutorials page. 

Research customs for the 21st century.

 I've begun to notice a number of customs that seem unique to our modern process of doing collaborative research in the 21st century. Most of them are technology-driven, and most of them involving annoying debates about the multitude of choices available for collaborating.

• Research Meetings: whether to do them over Skype, or Google Hangouts, or http://mathim.com or awwapp.com, or even with phones on a conference call. 
• Audio/Video/Chat: if over skype/G+, whether to do audio, or video, or chat. And then the obligatory pre-videconference primping to look presentable (or the reliance on bandwidth failure to NOT go on video)
• Coordination: careful calculations among multiple time zones and daylight savings times to plan meetings. The use of Doodle, Google calendar, or even random emails passed around haphazardly to plan said meetings.
• Writing I: the protracted negotiations over whether to use git, svn, rcs, or cvs, or Dropbox, or random emails passed around haphazardly (and yes I've done all of this, sometimes at the same time)
• Writing II: if using an actual modern VCS, then the equally protracted negotiations over who's hosting it, who needs account access, and where public keys need to be placed, and why CS researchers in the 21st century STILL need tutorials on ssh. 
• Writing III: Dealing with comments on a writeup: as fixmes, as todonotes, as issues in the git repository hosting the document, or as random emails passed around haphazardly. 

And of course all the collaborator "digital" personalities that emerge irrationally and violently. Alice hates using bibtex, and Bob will only use personally crafted bibtex files. Charlie loves his own special fonts and will have raging debates over $\varepsilon$ vs $\epsilon$. Dan has never used version control and doesn't see the point. Erin handcoded her own version control system in a cutting-edge fragment of Haskell and refuses to use anything else. Frank hates online meetings, and Mallory only thinks online during a meeting. Oscar insists that Postscript is Turing-complete and is therefore sufficient for all drawing needs. Peggy insists that git rebase is Turing-complete and is therefore sufficient to fix all commit disasters... eventually.

Note to all my collaborators who I'm currently writing papers with: you are awesome and have NOTHING AT ALL to do with this list.

Experiments with conference processes

NIPS is a premier conference in machine learning (arguably the best, or co-best with ICML). NIPS has also been a source of interesting and ongoing experiments with the process of reviewing.

For example, in 2010 Rich Zemel, who was a PC chair of NIPS at the time, experimented with a new system he and Laurent Charlin were developing that would determine the "fit" between a potential reviewer and a submitted paper. This system, called the Toronto Paper Matching System, is now being used regularly in the ML/vision communities.

This year, NIPS is trying another experiment. In brief,

10% of the papers submitted to NIPS were duplicated and reviewed by two independent groups of reviewers and Area Chairs.

And the goal is to determine how inconsistent the reviews are, as part of a larger effort to measure the variability in reviewing. There's even a prediction market set up to guess what the degree of inconsistency will be. Also see Neil Lawrence's fascinating blog describing the mechanics of constructing this year's PC and handling the review process.

I quite like the idea of 'data driven' experiments with format changes. It's a pity that we didn't have a way of measuring the effect of having a two-tier committee for STOC a few years ago, and instead had to rely on anecdotes about its effectiveness, and didn't even run the experiment long enough to collect enough data. I feel that every time there are proposals to change anything about the theory conference process, the discussion gets drowned out in a din of protests, irrelevant anecdotes, and opinions based entirely on ... nothing..., and nothing ever changes.

Maybe there's something about worst-case analysis (and thinking) that makes change hard :).

A response to Vint Cerf

A somewhat grumpy response to +Vint cerf 's request for feedback on how the ACM can do more for "professional programmers".

Dear  Dr. Cerf
  In your recent letter to the members of ACM, you write "I would like to ask readers how they satisfy their need to keep informed about computing practices and research results that may influence their own work". While I suspect your goal is to understand how ACM can serve the larger tech community and not the research community and I am a card-carrying member of the latter group, I thought I'd respond anyway.

First up, it's an ambitious (and brave!) idea to think that the ACM (or any single entity for that matter) can serve the needs of the vast technology enterprise. There was probably a time before the web when professional societies played an important role in collecting together people with shared interests and disseminating valuable information out to interested individuals. But now we have your current employer ! and online communities galore ! and Quora ! and the Stackexchange ecosystem ! and so many different ways for people to build communities, share information and learn about new ideas percolating through the world of tech.

It's a little funny though that you're worried about ACM's presence in the professional world. Many of us have long assumed that ACM spends most of its focus on that side of the computing community (the excellent revamp of the CACM under +Moshe Vardi  being the exception that proved the rule). In fact, I'd go as far as to argue that the ACM would be much better served if it were instead to realize how it's driving itself into irrelevance in a research community that so desperately needs an institutional voice.

How do we satisfy our need to keep informed about results that might influence our work ? We (still) read papers and go to conferences. And how does the ACM help ? Well not very well.

• Aggregating the deluge of information: anyone will tell you that the amount of research material to track and read has grown exponentially. But we still, to this day, have nothing like PUBMED/MEDLINE as a central clearinghouse for publications in CS-disciplines. The ACM DL is one step towards this, but it's a very poor imitation of what a 21st century repository of information should look like. It's not comprehensive, its bibliographic data is more erroneous than one expects, and the search mechanisms are just plain depressing (it's much easier to use Google)
• Dealing with the changing nature of peer review and publication: Sadly, ACM, rather than acting like a society with its members' interests at heart, has been acting as a for-profit publisher with a some window dressing to make it look less execrable. Many people have documented this far more effectively than I ever could. 
• Conference services: One of the services a national organization supposedly provides are the conference services that help keep communities running. But what exactly does the ACM do ? It sits back and nitpicks conference budgets, but provides little in the way of real institutional support. There's no infrastructure to help with conference review processes, no support for at-conference-time services like social networking, fostering online discussion and communities, and even modern web support. I only bring this up because all of these services exist, but piecemeal, and outside the ACM umbrella.

Underneath all of this is a slow but clear change in the overall CS research experience. The CRA has been doing yeoman service here: taking the temperature of the community every year with the Taulbee surveys, putting out a best practices document for postdocs after extensive community discussion, and even forming action groups to help gain more support for CS research from the government. Does the ACM do any of this ?

In many ways, this is a golden era for computer science, as the fruits of decades of work in our field seep out into the larger world under the guise of computational thinking, big data and learning. It's a perfect time for an organization that has deep connections in both the academic side of CS and the industrial side to help with  the translation and tech transfer needed to maximize the impact of the amazing new technologies we're all developing, as well as reach out to similar institutions in other areas to bring more CS into their communities (as you rightly pointed out)


But there is no sign that ACM has ideas about how to do this or even wants to. And while it continues to chase a professional tech community that doesn't seem to care about it at all, the academics who would have cared are finding their own way.

Things a _____ should do at least once...

Without quite realizing it, I managed to create a (tiny) meme in the rarefied circles of TCS/math with my post "Things a TCSer should have done at least once".

Firstly, you should check out the G+ post for even more scathing commentary on my original post.

Next, you should see the followups (in case you haven't already):

• Complexity blog: Things a complexity theorist....
• Turing's invisible hand: Things an AGTer....
• Peter Krautzberger (on Boole's rings): Things a set theorist..
• Computational Combinatorics: Things a graph theorist...
• Quantum Pontiff: Things a quantum information theorist ....

Let me know if there are more - I'm still waiting for a quantum computing version.(thanks, Pontiff!)

FOCS 2012 Student Support

I've been asked by Rafail Ostrovsky and David Shmoys to highlight that student support for travelling to FOCS 2012 is still available, and the deadline is this Friday.

They note that they can fund 24-25 people, so people in the US should apply EVEN IF they don't have a paper.

The NSF has been very generous of late in supporting student travel to conferences, and the best way to encourage them to continue is to show that we use the money they give us :). My students have taken advantage of these opportunities in the past, and it's been a great experience for them.

So if you're a student reading this (and I know there are many of you!) or if you're an advisor who may not have the funding to send your student(s) to FOCS, do take advantage of this chance.

FOCS 2012 Call for Posters

Four times makes it an institution ? 

After the poster events at STOC 2011, STOC 2012 and SoCG 2012, FOCS 2012 makes it four times. Tim Roughgarden notes that the deadline for submitting posters to FOCS 2012 is in two weeks (Sep 11). So if you have interesting work you'd like to air out in the theory comunity, and a deep longing to visit New Brunswick, New Jersey, then submit your entry.

By this time, there's a good chance that you've already experienced the posters event either as presenter or audience at one of these venues. If not, I'll reiterate what I've said before: presenting a poster is a great way to disseminate your work with more personalized interaction than you often get with a paper presentation.

Mihai Patrascu, R.I.P

I just got word from Mikkel Thorup that Mihai Patrascu passed away. I had heard that he was ill, and only realized the seriousness of his condition when I saw him at STOC 2012. He came in a wheelchair to be honored for getting a Presburger award, and the entire room gave him a standing ovation.

I can only hope that he's out there proving lower bounds in the sky, and arguing fiercely with the clouds while he does so.

Update: There is now a memorial page for Mihai at mipmemorial.blogspot.com. Please visit there to post your comments, and have a drink for Mihai !

Extracurricular events at STOC

I didn't do any STOC blogging this time, but I do want to say something about the extracurricular events.

For a while now, people (including me) have been clamoring for an expansion of the traditional three-days-of-talks format at theory conferences, and now STOC and FOCS (and SoCG soon!) are doing workshops, tutorials and poster sessions on a regular basis. Chandra Chekuri, Sergei Vassilvitskii and I organized the poster session at STOC this year, and Avrim Blum and Muthu (Muthu!) were in charge of workshops.

Workshops

How did they go ? The workshops, the day before the conference, looked extremely successful. Michael Kearns' morning tutorial on computational finance was standing room only in a large auditorium - I don't know the exact numbers but there were easily more than 150 people in the room. The workshops went pretty well as well: I spent much of my time at the distributed streaming workshop, and that was also standing room only, with probably at least 60 people in the room at all times.

I'm really glad that we had these events, and even happier that FOCS 2012 plans to continue the event. Speaking of which, Avrim is looking for workshop proposals for FOCS 2012, and specifically asked me to suggest that geometry folks suggest a workshop. The deadline is June 20, and all you need is a 2-page proposal and 2-3 people who'd organize it.

Posters

I'm of course biased about the poster session, but I do think it went off quite well, fueled by Howard Karloff's brilliant idea to provide ice cream sandwiches as refreshments during the event. There were 30 posters in all, and a ton of discussion. It was really nice to walk around looking at the posters and seeing the level of engagement. I polled a number of presenters and attendees, and they all seemed to enjoy the session.

The only complaint was that the poster session was too short, and that we should have left the posters up for people to browse while taking breaks. I think this is an excellent idea that the next posters committee (at FOCS 2012) should take into account.

The business meeting

We had an incredibly long business meeting - even our most rambunctious SODA meetings haven't gone on this long (almost 3 hours). For those not yet in the know, STOC 2012 is going to a two-tier format. Joan Feigenbaum is the chair, and the "must-not-be-called-senior"-PC will have 9 people on it. Their primary role will be managing the review process with the "certainly-not-junior"-PC consisting of 70-80 people who will review no more than 10 papers each, AND will be allowed to submit papers.

This is a major change for a theory conference, albeit one that was brought up for discussion at SODA 2012. I'm particularly curious to see how the whole "letting PC members submit papers" goes. Before everyone starts freaking out, it's worth pointing out that all this is effectively doing is bringing the unofficial reviewers into the fold, thereby giving them a chance to do reviews in context of the entire pool, rather than making isolated decisions. Since the unofficial reviewers were mostly drawn from the author pool, this is not too different from how it's always been. I'm hoping that the reduced load per reviewer will bring in better reviews and more consistency in decisions. 

All in all, a time of experimentation - workshops, posters, tutorials, two-tier PCs - the theory community moves slowly, but when it does move, things happen quickly :)

SODA Review II: The business meeting

Jeff Phillips posts a roundup of the SODA business meeting. Hawaii !!!!!!

I thought I would also post a few notes on the SODA business meeting. I am sure I missed some details, but here are the main points.

Everyone thought the organization of the conference was excellent (so far). The part in parenthesis is a joke by Kazuo Iwama towards his students - I guess that is Japanese humor, and encouragement.

Despite being outside of North America for the first time, the attendance was quite high, I think around 350 people. And the splits were almost exactly 1/3 NA, 1/3 Europe, 1/3 Asia.

Yuval Rabani talked about being PC for the conference. He said there were the most submissions ever, most accepted paper ever, and largest PC ever for SODA. Each PC member reviewers about 49 papers, and over 500 were sub-reviewed. We all thank Yuval for all of his hard work.

We voted next on location for 2014 (2013 is in New Orleans). The final votes were down to Honolulu, HI and Washington DC, where Honolulu won about 60 to 49. David Johnson said they would try to book a hotel in Honolulu if he could get hotel prices below 200 USD/night. A quick look on kayak.com made it appear several large hotels could be booked next year around this time for about 160 USD/night or so. Otherwise it will be in DC where the theory group at UMaryland (via David Mount) have stated they would help with local arrangements. They did a great job with SoCG a few years ago, but I heard many suggestions that it be held more downtown than by UofM campus. And also there were requests for good weather. We'll see what happens...

Finally, there was a discussion about how SODA is organized/governed. This discussion got quite lively. Bob Sedgewick led the discussion by providing a short series of slides outlining a rough plan for a "confederated SODA." I have linked to his slides. This could mean several things, for instance:

• Having ALENEX and ANALCO (and SODA) talks spread out over 4 days and intermixed even possibly in the same session (much like ESA).
• The PCs would stay separate most likely (although merging them was discussed, but this had less support). 
• For SODA the PC could be made more hierarchical where there are, say, 6 main area chairs. Then each area chair supervises say 12 or so PC members. The general chair would coordinate and normalize all of the reviews, but otherwise it would be more hierarchical and partitioned. Then PC members in each area would have fewer papers to review, and could submit to other subareas even. 
• There was also a suggestion that PC chairs / steering committee members have some SODA attendance requirements. (Currently it consists of David Johnson, 2 people appointed by SIAM, and the past two PC chairs - as I think I understand. David Johnson said he would provide a link to the official SODA bylaws somewhere.). 

Anyways, there was a lot of discussion that was boiled down to 3 votes (I will try to paraphrase, all vote totals approximate):

• Should the steering committee consider spreading ALENEX, ANALCO, and SODA talks over 4 days? About 50 to 7 in favor. 
• Should the steering committee consider/explore some variant of the Confederated SODA model? About 50 to 2 in favor.
• Should the steering committee consider making the steering committee members elected? About 50 to 1 in favor. 

There were about 100+ votes for location, so usually about half the crowd abstained for all votes. There were various arguments on either side of the positions. And other suggestions. Some people had very strong and well-argued sides of these discussion points, so I don't want to try to paraphrase (and probably get something nuanced wrong), but I encourage people to post opinions and ideas in the comments.

On PC members submitting papers

Update: Michael Mitzenmacher's posts (one, two, and three, and the resulting comments) on implementing CoI at STOC are well worth reading (thanks, Michael). The comments there make me despair that *any* change will ever be implemented before the next century, but given that we've been able to make some changes already (electronic proceedings, contributed workshops, and so on), I remain hopeful.


For all but theory researchers, the reaction to the above statement is usually "don't they always?". In theoryCS, we pride ourselves on not having PC members submit papers to conferences. What ends up happening is:

• You can't have too many PC members on a committee because otherwise there won't be enough submissions
• The load on each PC member is much larger than reasonable (I'm managing 41 papers for STOC right now, and it's not uncommon to hit 60+ for SODA)

There's an ancillary effect that because of the first point, theory folks have fewer 'PC memberships' on their CV  which can cause problems for academic performance review, but this is a classic Goodhart's Law issue, so I won't worry about it.

The main principle at play here is: we don't want potentially messy conflicts or complex conflict management issues if we do have PC members submitting papers. However, it seems to me that the practice of how we review papers is far different from this principle. 

Consider: I get an assignment of X papers to review if I'm on a conference PC. I then scramble around finding subreviewers for a good fraction of the papers I'm assigned (I used to do this less, but I eventually realized that a qualified subreviewer is FAR better than me in most subareas outside my own expertise, and is better for the paper).

Note (and this is important) my subreviewers have typically submitted papers to this conference (although I don't check) and I rely on them to declare any conflicts as per conference guidelines.

Subreviewers also get requests from different PC members, and some subreviewers might themselves review 3-4 papers.

Compare this to (say) a data mining conference: there are 30+ "area chairs" or "vice chairs", and over 200 PC members. PC members each review between 5-10 papers, and often don't even know who the other reviewers are (although they can see their reviews once they're done). The area/vice chairs manage 20-30 papers each, and their job is to study the reviews, encourage discussion as needed, and formulate the final consensus decision and 'meta-review'.


If you set "theory subreviewer = PC member" and "theory PC member = vice chair", you get systems that aren't significantly different. The main differences are:

• theory subreviewers don't typically get to see other reviews of the paper. So their score assignment is in a vacuum. 
• theory PC members are expected to produce a review for a paper taking the subreviewer comments into account (as opposed to merely scrutinizing the reviews being provided)
• managing reviewer comments for 30 papers is quite different to generating 30 reviews yourself (even with subreviewer help)
• A downside of the two-tier PC system is also that there isn't the same global view of the entire pool that a theory PC gets. But this is more a convention than a rule: there's nothing stopping a PC for opening up discussions to all vice chairs. 
• One advantage of area chairs is that at least all papers in a given area get one common (re)viewer. that's not necessarily the case in a theory PC without explicit coordination from the PC chair and the committee itself.

But the main claimed difference (that people submitting papers don't get to review them) is false. Even worse, when submitters do review papers, this is 'under the table' and so there isn't the same strict conflict management that happens with explicit PC membership. 

We're dealing with problems of scale in all aspects of the paper review and evaluation process. This particular one though could be fixed quite easily.

CGWeek !!!

If you're on the compgeom mailing list, you probably know this already, but if not, read on:

There's an increased interest in expanding the nature and scope of events at SoCG beyond the conference proper. To this end, Joe Mitchell put together a committee titled "CG:APT" (CG: applications, practice and theory) to chalk out a strategy and solicit contributions.

The call for contributions is now out, and the main nugget is this:

Proposals are invited for workshops/minisymposia, or other types of events on topics related to all aspects of computational geometry and its applications. Typical events may feature some number of invited speakers and possibly some number of contributed presentations. Events may feature other forms of communications/presentations too, e.g., via software demos, panel discussions, industry forum, tutorials, posters, videos, implementation challenge, artwork, etc. CG:APT events will have no formal proceedings; optionally, the organizers may coordinate with journals to publish special issues or arrange for other dissemination (e.g., via arXiv, webpages, printed booklets, etc).

In other words, anything goes ! (this is an experiment, after all). Topics are essentially anything that might be of interest geometrically in a broad sense (i.e not limited to what might appear at the conference itself).

I'd strongly encourage people to consider putting together a proposal for an event. The procedure is really simple, and only needs a two page proposal containing:

1. Title/theme of the workshop/minisymposium/event 
2. Organizer(s) (name, email) 
3. Brief scientific summary and discussion of merits (to CG) of the proposed topic. 
4. A description of the proposed format and agenda 
5. Proposed duration: include both minimum and ideal; we anticipate durations of approximately a half day (afternoon), with the possibility that some meritorious events could extend across two half-days. 
6. Procedures for selecting participants and presenters 
7. Intended audience 
8. Potential invited speakers/panelists 
9. Plans for dissemination (e.g., journal special issues) 
10. Past experience of the organizer(s) relevant to the event 

Please note: EVERY COMMUNITY DOES THIS (and now, even theory). The deadline is Jan 13, 2012, and proposals should be emailed to Joe Mitchell (joseph.mitchell@stonybrook.edu). Note that the idea is for such events to be in the afternoon, after morning technical sessions of SoCG.

There are many people out there who grumble about how insular the CG community is. Now's your chance to walk into the lion's den (at Chapel Hill) and tell it off :).

SoCG and ACM: The Results Show

From Mark de Berg:

The bottom row of the table [below] gives the number of votes for each of the three options

A.    I prefer to stay with ACM.

B.    If involvement of ACM can be restricted to publishing the proceedings, at low cost for SoCG, then I prefer to stay with ACM; otherwise I prefer to leave ACM.

C.     I prefer to leave ACM, and organize SoCG as an independent conference with proceedings published in LIPIcs.

and it also gives a breakdown of the votes by the number of SoCG’s that the voter attended in the last 10 years.  

	A: stay	B: proceedings only	C: leave	total
A: 0	4	3	3	10
B: 1-2	6	16	19	41
C: 3-5	11	15	16	42
D: >5	8	14	9	31
total	29	48	47	124

Based on the result of the Poll, the Steering Committee decided to start negotiating with ACM to see if they can offer SoCG an arrangement in which involvement of ACM is limited primarily to publishing the proceedings, with the possible option for greater involvement if the local organizers request/require it.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

On getting rid of ACM affiliation...

As I mentioned earlier, the SoCG steering committee is running a poll on whether to separate SoCG from ACM and run it as an independent symposium with proceedings published by the Dagstuhl LIPIcs series.

At the time I had considered writing a post expressing my own thoughts on the matter, and then promptly forgot about it. The poll is still open (although probably many of you have voted already) and so I thought (with some external nudging :)) that I'd state my position here (one that I summarized in brief for the poll).

If you'd rather not read any more, here's the summary: 

I think it's a bad idea.

And here's why

I understand the rationale behind this: it can be a little difficult to work with ACM. ACM does take a contingency fee that increases registration. The cost of proceedings is a significant fraction of the total budget, and the timelines can be a little tricky to work with. These and more are outlined in the poll document, and you can read all the points being made there.

But that's not why I think this is a bad idea (and I do have specific objections to the claims above). I think it's a bad idea because ACM is not just a conference organizing, proceedings publishing enterprise that has bad taste in style files. It's also the home of SIGACT. 

For better or worse, SIGACT is the flagship representative body for theoretical computer science in the US. General theory activities like the Theory Matters wiki and the SIGACT committee for the advancement of theoretical computer science were jump-started by SIGACT. Association with SIGACT means that the work you do is 'theoryCS (A)' in some shape of form.

If you're doing geometry in the US, then affiliation with SIGACT is not a bad thing. It means that you're part of the larger theory community. It means that when the theory community makes pitches to the NSF to get more funding for theory research, you're included. It also helps because there aren't other communities (SIGGRAPH?) ready to absorb geometry into their fold. 

While de-linking from ACM doesn't mean that we turn in our 'theory badges', it doesn't help the already fraught relationship between computational geometry and the larger theory community. And while the relationship with ACM is not crucial to the survival of the geometry community in the US, being part of a larger theory community that speaks the same language is crucial.

p.s The center of mass in CG is closer to Europe than many might realize. I understand that our European colleagues could care less about US funding and community issues, which is fair for them. But this matter affects US-resident folks more than ACM's surcharges affect the European researchers, and  our community isn't so big that we can withstand shocks to one side of it.

SoCG and ACM: Relationship status - Complicated.

Mark de Berg (secretary of the SoCG steering committee), sent out an email to the compgeom mailing list that starts:

Since its start 27 years ago, SoCG has always been affiliated to ACM. This means that the proceedings are published by ACM, and that the symposium is organized “sponsored by ACM” (more precisely, sponsored by ACM SIGACT & ACM SIGGRAPH) or “in cooperation with ACM”. The latter happened only a couple of times, namely when SoCG was in Korea in 2007 and when it was in Denmark in 2009. Being affiliated to ACM has certain advantages, but also certain disadvantages, as detailed below. Hence, at the business meeting of this year’s SoCG in Paris, an alternative was discussed: organizing SoCG as an independent symposium, with the proceedings being published by Dagstuhl in their LIPIcs series (see below). A straw poll was taken, and the vast majority of the participants wanted the Steering Committee to investigate this issue further, which we do through this opinion poll. We hope you want to participate in this important poll.

If you have an interest in how the relationship between SoCG and the ACM continues (or doesn't), I'd strongly encourage you to participate in the poll. The poll documents will eventually be are posted on http://computational-geometry.org, and in the meantime here's a google doc you can read. 

Life in a crowd-sourced research world

(Sung to the tune of "War", and with a Jackie Chan accent for bonus points)

Jo-ur-nals !

What are they good for !

Absolutely nothing !

There are popular tropes in current discussions on crowd-sourcing research. There's the "scientists as Mean Girls" view of the current state of affairs. There's the utopian "Let a thousand papers bloom in the open research garden". There's the anti-capitalist "Down with evil money-grubbing publishers", and there's of course the always popular "Everything tastes better with crowd-sourced reputation points and achievement badges". 

But have we really thought through the implications of doing away with the current frameworks for "dissemination, verification and attention management" ?

Here's a tl;dr a la Cosma Shalizi: 

A more open research environment, where all work is published before review, and anyone is free to comment on any work in public without repercussions, is both valuable as well as  more chaotic and unpleasant than we might be ready for.

Consider a pure "publish-then-filter" world, in which you dumped your paper in a public repository that had commenting, reviewing, reputation features, achievement badges and whatever other technological goodies you wanted to throw in. 

You'd be in a world not unlike the world that writers and musicians live in today. Since big music/book publishers (read "journals") take a big cut of the royalty revenues ("journal subscriptions") in exchange for promotion/marketing (read "stamps of authenticity"), many authors and musicians have developed smaller but successful brands by going on the road themselves, doing online promotions, cultivating their fan base with special material, downloads, T-shirts, event tickets and what not, and relying on underground word-of-mouth to establish a presence.

Are you ready to do the same ?

It's naive to think that merely putting papers on a repository and waiting for attention to appear will actually work to disseminate your work. Attention is probably the most valuable resource available to us in this connected era, and the one most fiercely fought over by everyone. No one is going to even be able to pay attention to your work unless you promote it extensively, OR unless there are external ways of signalling value. 

If you think that reputation mechanisms will help, I will merely ask you to look at the attention garnered by the latest Ke$ha single compared to the attention given to <insert name of your favorite underground-not-selling-out-obscure-indie-band-that-will-set-the-world-on-fire here >. 

Secondly, I think as researchers, we would cringe at the kind of explicit promotion that authors/musicians have to indulge in. Would you really want to sell tickets for the "1.46 approximation to graphic TSP paper tour?". How would you afford it ? 

There's a third aspect to living in a crowd-sourced research world: a loss of mental space. While it should be clear to anyone who follows my blog/tweets/G+/comments on cstheory that I enjoy the modern networked world, it's also clear to me that actual research requires some distance.

In Anathem, Neal Stephenson describes a monastery of mathematics, where monks do their own research, and at regular intervals (1/10/100/1000 years) open their doors to the "seculars" to reveal their discoveries to the outside world.

Even with collaborations, skype, shared documents and github, you still need time (and space) to think. And in a completely open research environment where everything you post can be commented on by anyone,  I can assure you that you'll spend most of your time dealing with comment threads and slashdotting/reditting/HNing (if you're lucky). Are you ready to deploy a 24 hour rapid-response team to deal with the flaming your papers will get ?

Let me be very clear about something. I think there are many academic institutions (journals and conferences especially) that are in desperate need of overhauls and the Internet makes much of this possible. I think it's possible (but I'm less convinced) that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm for doing research, and debates like the ones we are having are extremely important to shape this new paradigm if it comes into being. In that context, I think that what Timothy Gowers (here and now here) and Noam Nisan (here and here) are trying to do is very constructive: not just complain about the current state of affairs or defend the status quo, but try to identify the key things that are good AND bad about our current system AND find a path to a desired destination.

But human nature doesn't change that quickly. New ways of disseminating, valuing and verifying research will definitely change what's valued and what's not, and can help open up the research enterprise to those who feel the current system isn't working (i.e most of us). But when you replace one evaluation system by another, don't be too sure that the new system is fairer - it might merely change what gets valued (i.e the peaks might change but not the distribution itself)

FOCS 2011 Registration open

Marek Chrobak informs me that FOCS 2011 registration is open. The conference is being held from Oct 22-25 in Palm Springs CA, home of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway that does a record 8500 ft (2600 m) elevation gain to give you views of the valley.

When you're not being made dizzy by the views, attend a tutorial or two or three ! Cynthia Dwork, Kirk Pruhs and Vinod Vaikuntanathan are the headliners for a day of tutorials on Saturday Oct 22. Shafi Goldwasser will be awarded the 2011 IEEE Emmanuel R. Piore Award, given for "outstanding contributions in the field of information processing, in relation to computer science".

I'm told there are also some talks, including some that smash through barriers for the k-server conjecture, metric TSP (in graphs) (twice over), and exact 3SAT.

Register now so that local organizers don't go crazy (I can assure you that they do :)). The deadline is Sep 29 for cheap rates on hotels and registration. And if you'd like to be a FOCS 2011 reporter and write a set of blog posts summarizing the conference for cstheory.blogoverflow.com, please add a note to this post.

A way forward on reformatting conferences

In some circles, it's a badge of honor to attend as few talks at a conference as possible. Some of the usual comments are:

• "I go to meet people, not attend talks"
• "All the interesting conversations happen in the hallways"
• "Talks are too difficult to follow: I'd rather read the paper or just ask the author"
• "I read this paper 6 months ago when it appeared on the arxiv: it's old news now, and there are improvements"

You have to wonder why anyone gives talks at a conference any more ! And Moshe Vardi asks this question in a CACM note. Riffing off of "a conference is a journal held in a hotel" (attributed to Lance Fortnow, who attributes it to Ed Lazowska), he talks about the low quality of conference talks, and suggests ways to improve them.

But there's a certain 'band-aid on a bleeding carcass' aspect to this discussion. Indeed, between overloaded reviewers, authors who need the imprimatur of a prestigious conference, and registration fees that skyrocket as meetings get longer, it almost seems like this system is heading for a nervous breakdown.

But there are a number of experiments in play that point the way towards a gentler, kinder conference system (even if we decide not to grow up). In this G+ discussion, Fernando Pereira and Zach Ives describe two models that put together address the main problems with our conference process.

NIPS receives over 1400 submissions, and accepts a small fraction (generally under 20%, and usually much less a little over 20%). All papers are presented as posters (with a few special talks). This does two things:

1. It removes artificial limits on number of papers accepted based on conference duration. Posters are presented in (semi)-parallel. 
2. It eliminates the "20-minutes of droning with no questions" style of many conference talks. Posters are a much more interactive way of presenting material, and it's easier to skim papers, talk to the authors, and have a good discussion. The papers are still in the proceedings, so you can always "read the paper" if you want. As an aside, it really helps with communication skills if you have to answer questions on the fly. 

VLDB has now moved to a journal-based submission process. There's a deadline each month for submitting papers for review. The review process is fairly quick: 45 days or so, with enough time for back and forth with the authors. Accepted papers are published in the proceedings, and while I'm not sure exactly how the conference selects talks for presentation, it's possible that all accepted papers are then presented. The main advantages of this process:

1. There isn't a huge burst of submissions, followed by a draining review process. Reviews are spread out over the year. Moreover, area chairs are used to partition papers further, so any (P)VLDB reviewer only gets  a few papers to review each month. This can only improve the quality of reviews.
2. The journal-style back-and-forth makes papers better. Authors can make changes as recommended, rather than trying to defend their choices in an often-contentious rebuttal process. 

Between these two systems, we have a better review process for papers, and a better way of delivering the content once reviewed. Why not combine them ?