Thursday, April 15, 2010

Yahoo!'s Key Scientific Challenges: Your student is a winner!

I got the following email:

Dear Panos,

The judging is done. From an outstanding group of 200 proposals, twenty-two exceptional PhD students have been selected to be part of Yahoo!’s 2010 Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program. Your student, Nikolay Archak has been chosen to receive this very competitive award. Congratulations!

Supporting the academic community is a top priority at Yahoo!. We created the KSC Program to support a limited number of outstanding PhD students who we believe are doing research in very important and challenging areas. The Program provides each student with $5,000 of unrestricted funds for the support of their research activities (e.g., conference fees and travel, lab materials, professional society membership dues, etc.). The funds are distributed through the university and paid directly to the student for use at their discretion. As part of this program, the student also receives an exclusive invitation to a unique workshop (most likely to be held in August at our location in Sunnyvale, California), where we will focus on novel disciplines and important technical challenges for the Internet research community, slanted specifically for graduate students whose innovative work is just emerging. We think that the opportunity to interact with Yahoo! scientists and other top graduate students in an informal and supportive environment without having to submit papers for review will provide a unique forum for open and stimulating discussion of work in its early stages.

Students will also have the opportunity to work with select datasets through our Webscope program. Yahoo! will cover all travel expenses to the KSC Workshop independent of the $5,000 award.

We are excited to be able to support these students with KSC grants, and we look forward to having them as part of our broad research alliance of outstanding students and faculty. Please feel free to contact Jamie Lockwood at jamieloc@yahoo-inc.com if you have any questions regarding our KSC Program.

I offer you my warmest congratulations. We eagerly look forward to hosting Nikolay at our KSC Workshop as part of the Yahoo! family.

Best regards,

Ken Schmidt
Director, Academic Relations

 Nikolay is not a stranger to winning competitions. He has won in the past 3 times the TopCoder competition, ended up 2nd two more times. He also has a streak of accepted publications, including a single-authored paper at WWW2010 this year.

Nikolay, congratulations!

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Stop Publishing!

The last few months, I feel that I have an endless queue of reviewing tasks to complete. WWW, followed by DBRank, followed by EC, followed by KDD, followed by VLDB, followed by WebDB, plus an NSF panel, plus some journal reviews, and I have rejected invitations for a few additional conferences including SIGIR, SIGMOD, and a few others. This puts my count at least 40 reviews over the last 4-5 months. (Just to break even, I will need to submit 10-12 papers.)

Needless to say, having such a reviewing load means that I cannot really do a good job in reviewing. My reviews have been declining in quality, signalling that I need to learn to say no.

At the same time, I also notice that the other reviews that are being submitted are not that great either. While on the one hand I feel happy ("OK, I am not that bad"), on the other hand I feel that this cannot be good. If nobody has time to review thoroughly, what is the whole point of peer reviewing?

One solution is to accept fewer invitations for PCs, allowing for more time per paper. However, I know that without volunteering time and effort for reviewing the system cannot work! There are simply not that many reviewers available!

Part of this problem is, of course, the increased need to get papers published: For tenure, for getting a job, even for being admitted to a PhD program! I feel that there is something wrong when, to be admitted to a PhD program, you need to have already research experience. This increased need for more and more publications, overloads the reviewing system which unfortunately has a limited capacity.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to reverse this trend. The incentives are setup in a way to encourage quantity of publications, preferably in good venues. Once the paper gets accepted in a good venue, the goal is achieved. This encourages publications that are "good enough" to pass the reviewing process, not papers that have stellar quality. And with the increased noise in the reviewing process, the distinction between "good enough to be published" and "what the hell, send it, we may get lucky" is getting blurrier and blurrier. In fact, I have cases in my papers that the reviewers did such a poor job that I never understood at the end if my paper was worth getting published, or I got just lucky.

I noticed though a positive development! Through the Greek University Reform Forum, I learned that:


The German Research Society (DFG) has introduced new guidelines for applications and evaluations of proposals, which will be valid as of July 1, 2010.

A rough-and-ready translation of the main points:
  • Applicants should cite in their CV only up to FIVE publications, those which are most relevant for the proposal at hand;
  • In reports about running projects, a maximum of TWO publications PER YEAR. In case of projects with more than one PIs, a maximum of THREE publications PER YEAR.
  • The goal of the new guideleines is to put emphasis on quality instead of quantity and to stop the flood of publishing for the sake of the numbers.

It has caused quite some stir here in Germany and the voices to enforce such rules also for decisions on faculty positions are getting louder.

While some of these ideas are already in place (e.g., NSF also allows only five publications in the CV), the idea of "counting" only two publications per year for each project is definitely a step towards the right direction. It is not going to be trivial to reverse the "get as many publications in top venues as possible" trend, but every step towards de-emphasizing quantity counts.

After all, Pollock was also getting paid by the piece when he worked for the Federal Art Project, but none of his famous paintings come from that period.