
What Makes a Graphics Systems Paper Beautiful - wcrichton
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/notes/systemspaper/
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boulos
Disclosure: Kayvon and I were office mates, and I've supported his research
while at Google (and the wchrichton's research as well).

Amusingly, most of the papers highlighted come from industry experience /
application. Part of this is self selection (Kayvon knows these people and
these papers). But I believe an unstated component is one of the challenge of
academic systems research: access to the seriously interesting challenges.
Thus isn't specific to graphics, as many of my favorite papers from ISCA,
NSDI, etc. are also industry-led backwards looking systems papers (though
many, if not most, of the authors previously went to grad school).

Industry/Academia partnerships often produce the best systems work, precisely
because industry can offer the challenge, while academics can step back and
see how they might solve the problem completely differently. The natural
tendency in most companies is to keep stringing along some small improvements
that last you another six months. While it's true that every once in a while,
someone does a big rewrite, they are often rare and for good reason. My
favorite example came from a talk Jeff Dean gave at Stanford, where he
explained you should design a system to scale 10x but not 100x, because by
then it should be redone.

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markwhiting
I really appreciate these kinds of things because I think they help fields
move forward in some cases.

Does anyone know of good ones for HCI papers?

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theon144
I was wondering how SIGGRAPH's "sexiness" paper criterion played out with all
consequences, but never really sat down and looked into it, being satisfied
with all the highlights and cool results.

Rejecting "systems papers" despite being valuable and novel definitely seems
like an oversight this could produce. As "flashiness" is a key part of
SIGGRAPH, I'm wondering whether there could be an alternative conference, or
maybe a subconference that's as competitive/prestigious but is a bit more
friendly to stuff like graphics systems?

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boulos
Actually, that was one of the goals of High Performance Graphics. We
explicitly merged the low brow Ray Tracing Symposium and Graphics Hardware,
precisely so we could publish and discuss interesting systems-ey things that
move the world forward but often aren't really broad or sexy enough for a
general SIGGRAPH audience. I don't think there's a great way for it to be
considered equally prestigious, but as an author you know (for better or for
worse) that you'll have more sympathetic readership.

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zimpenfish
I read the title as "(Graphics Systems) (Paper Beautiful)" and was expecting
something by Tufte or Knuth.

In retrospect, the plural on system should have collapsed that to "(Graphics)
(Systems Paper) (Beautiful)" but I clearly wasn't awake enough.

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boulos
Will (or the title submission adjustment system) removed the parenthetical
around (Graphics) which would have been more clear.

