Re: [Tccc] Different community, similar problems? (Henning Schulzrinne)

Part of the problem (rather big part) is that in some segments of the community the perception of what conferences are and what archival journals are, does not agree with the perception in other parts of the community. The "real" research results that are scrutinized and are carefully reviewed with the possibility of rebuttal and resolution and for which the writing should be optimized are and should be found in archival journals. Conferences are forums for early exposure and exchange of ideas. So, acceptance at a conference should not be a big deal. And hence, while gleaning out the real garbage, most of the papers that have some merit should be accepted. Mistakes of both kinds (i.e. good papers that are rejected and bad papers that are accepted) will necessarily be made under the strict deadlines of conference reviews and with the preponderance of immature reviewers and TPC members which is unavoidable with the explosive number of conferences, workshops, and symposia.
So, yes, 22% acceptance rate is not an indication of selectivity on the basis of quality, but, rather an indication of selectivity based on randomness, biases, and self-aggrandizement.

AE

Anthony Ephremides
Cynthia Kim Professor of Information Technolgy
ECE dept & ISR, University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
301-405-3641, etony(at)umd(dot)edu

-----Original Message-----
From: tccc-bounces@lists.cs.columbia.edu [mailto:tccc-bounces@lists.cs.columbia.edu] On Behalf Of Mark Allman
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 11:57 AM
To: Joe Touch
Cc: 'Victor Bahl'; 'Mani Srivastava'; tccc@lists.cs.columbia.edu
Subject: Re: [Tccc] Different community, similar problems? (Henning Schulzrinne)

Joe-

> IMO, we need to determine whether there's something about our work
> that truly is unique and warrants <10% conference accept rates and
> long review timelines - and make that case on its own merit (not just
> "that's how it's always been"),

I'm not sure I even understand your point here Joe. Two things ...

- Conferences have long review timelines? I don't agree. I mean,
3--4 months is pretty much all I ever wait for conferences (less for
workshops, more for journals). That doesn't strike me as
particularly long or onerous.

- As for the rate... its driven by the conference style (see Victor's
nice post on this) and the denominator. I just finished chairing
IMC (a pretty top-tier venue for measurement work). We had an
accept rate of 22% (47 / 211 submissions). Is that good? Bad? I
dunno. But, what I know is that the 47 papers fill a full three day
single track conference---i.e., the time allotted. (Note: the
papers are a mix of long (14 page) and short (6 page) papers and get
differing amounts of presentation time at the conference.) Last
year's conference also filled three full days, but had a higher
accept rate because the number of submissions was lower. The 2009
conference went to three full days (from 2.5) in an effort to
increase the numerator. Conferences can also go multi-track. Etc.
But, these sorts of decisions have cons, as well. So, to me, the
rate really says very little by itself (e.g., as cited on people's
vitas) and we spend far too much time obsessing about the accept
rate.

And one more thing on hyper-criticality:

- Half the papers received at most of the conferences and workshops I
have been on the PC of are junk of some form (writing, technical
methodology, analysis, etc.). And, many more simply don't measure
up to close to the bar. I don't condone reviewers being rude or
biased or whatnot in their comments. But, lets also not pretend
that of IMC's 211 submissions there were 211 good papers and
oh-isn't-it-a-shame that we couldn't accept all of them. That just
isn't the case. The input to the process is not somehow beyond
reproach. A data point is that going into the IMC PC meeting a few
weeks ago we were still considering 72 papers---i.e., about
one-third of the submissions.

And, BTW, I try very hard to look for the good in all these junk
papers and encourage authors. I think many times there are indeed
interesting / novel / useful nuggets in these papers, but these are
not well explored and I am hopeful that they can be with a bit more
elbow grease and so I try to be helpful. So, it isn't like I think
these "junk" papers are somehow beyond repair or doomed to "junk"
status forever. But, we should face facts that we see a lot of
cruddy papers and perhaps one of the things we should try to do as a
community is have a little more shame in terms of what we send out.

FWIW.

allman

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