
Best Papers from 27 Top-Tier Computer Science Conferences - jholdenm
http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#
======
dude_abides
This is an awesome compilation. Thanks!

Few comments:

\- Take the institution ranks (except the top 10) with a grain of salt. In
theory conferences (eg. FOCS, STOC, SODA), the order of authors is
alphabetical.

\- Best student paper has a different meaning for theory vs systems
conferences. In theory conferences, it is given to a paper who's all authors
are full-time students. In systems conferences, it is given to a paper who's
first author is a full-time student. So best student papers in theory
conferences are particularly good reflectors of an institution's merit and
should be included.

\- A thought/idea: Most top conferences in CS tend to have inner cliques. So
if you rank institutions merely by their program committee
membership/chairship in these conferences, the resulting ranking might look
very similar to this list. The differences between the two lists might be one
way to bring out "rising star" institutions.

~~~
scott_s
_In theory conferences, it is given to a paper who's all authors are full-time
students._

But the theory community does not place a student's advisor's name on the
paper as a matter of course, correct? While in the systems community, the
advisors name will usually be on the paper, listed last. With that in mind,
the two classifications of "student paper" represent close to the same thing.

~~~
lrem
Unless the advisor's name goes first, due to alphabetic order... I guess
having a surname starting on 'M' can harm my academic career :/

~~~
scott_s
As dude_abides says, alphabetical order is common in theory. But in systems,
author ordering typically indicates contribution and/or status.

~~~
lrem
Well, my team publishes in both, and the team-wide rule is to always put
alphabetical.

------
lifeisstillgood
I was watching tptacek talk on crypto/pen testing and he mentioned that a flaw
published 15 years ago, is still being put into the wild by general web
developers, in big companies who should know better.

And I was also reminded of the checklist manifesto - where the Boeing (?)
flight safety team analyse each crash report, and produce checklists for
pilots that are pushed out around the world and actually read

so here is a silly idea

A kick-starter that funds a group to guide writing of real actual best
practise in software engineering - broken down into silos like realtime or web
or os. It can be updated and informed wiki style but is aimed at spreading
actionable, immediate choices, with the background reading to educate later
on,

Maybe I need more (or less) coffee

~~~
beagle3
> A kick-starter that funds a group to guide writing of real actual best
> practise in software engineering - broken down into silos like realtime or
> web or os.

There are enough reasonable guides to writing better code (security and
otherwise). How would this effort be different? And more importantly, why
would Random J. Programmer go there if he didn't go to any of the previous
ones?

A good answer for that will cause me to chip in (even though I'm not a fan of
the "kickstart everything" craze)

~~~
maayank
What's easier and more plausible to happen - Random J. reading a long
processing-cycles-demanding guide or just following a checklist?

Random J. seeing a link to/start of a guide: "that seems long and intricate...
I don't have time to grok this and it seems like that kind of thing that to
apply you need to grok and understand."

Random J. seeing a checklist: "ah, just following the steps. I can do this."

Maybe it's an inconvenient truth, but such checklists would be an overall
boost to software security. Having straight-forward checklist to mechanically
follow > Having no checklist.

Me and you would want to go behind that. Random J. Programmer wouldn't.

~~~
beagle3
> or just following a checklist?

Well, OP didn't suggest a checklist (he did refer to the Boeing one as
inspiration, so he might have thought about that).

And while they might be a hundred times more likely to follow a checklist, a
hundred times (almost zero) is still (almost zero).

Let me re-iterate the question/problem:

> Random J. seeing a checklist: "ah, just following the steps. I can do this."

The question is: why would Random J. see the checklist? This is the crux that
needs to be addressed. The content and existence of the list, while important,
is a much easier problem to solve.

~~~
maayank
It's true that there are people not being aware of the information now and
they'll be people not aware of it in the future. But I think[1] there's a
large group of people who are aware that the information exists, but are just
ignoring it as they deem that info too complex/time consuming to learn.
Enabling better security practices for this group would be an overall net
gain.

[1] Based on my past experiences, YMMV :-)

------
dvse
These "best paper" lists are almost comical and a very poor way to find
important papers. Have a look at citation statistics for the older "winners",
they are only marginally better than the average for the venue - essentially
nobody still reads them today and they've had hardly any impact all.

To find _important_ papers you want at least 5-10 years of hindsight - look
for those that are still being cited a lot correcting for citation rings,
dubious journals/conferences etc. As a side benefit, these can almost always
be found online on some course website without requiring IEEE / ACM
subscriptions.

~~~
abbyroad9191
What's happening to hackernews? While there's still a handful of insightful
comments and submissions, the culture feels like it's starting to shift with
everyone having their noses in the air. I'm starting to use this site less and
less, and it's a shame. Oh well.

~~~
batista
Your rant is relevant to the insightful parent --which also provides arguments
for what it says--, how exactly?

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Dn_Ab
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research. Is being backed by companies with
strong monopolies the only way to do world class research outside of academia?

Supposing it is true that in the future, higher educations collapses to a
currently unrecognizable form and large companies become untenable, what will
drive innovation? Who will fund say building a quantum computer?

~~~
javert
Bell Labs had a monopoly, as part of Bell Telephone, which was (AFAIK) granted
exclusive right to provide telephone service. Microsoft does not. AFAIK, Xerox
never has had a monopoly.

Having a large amount of marketshare != a monopoly.

Lots of people insist on using the term for both things. I don't know why. But
even if you are one of those people, surely you will see there there is a
fundamental difference between those two things.

For the sake of this discussion, it would be necessary to differentiate
between them.

~~~
zmanji
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.

~~~
javert
And that conviction was immoral and improper. Microsoft did not have a
monopoly in the proper sense of the term, only in the sense used by anti-
business people who want to twist the term to suit their own purpose.

------
larsberg
It will be interesting to see how those papers compare with the Most
Influential awards which, at least for SIGPLAN conferences, are given 10 years
later.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGPLAN>

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dandrews
None of these were about garbage collection, which surprises me. Is GC
considered a solved problem?

~~~
dudenewcomb
www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf

"In particular, when garbage collection has ﬁve times as much memory as
required, its runtime performance matches or slightly exceeds that of explicit
memory management."

Yep. Like most problems in life, it's 'solved' if you have the money.

~~~
jules
That's talking about throughput. Getting good pause times _and_ good
throughput is still hard. Even if you have 100x as much memory, you still get
the same pause times (albeit less frequently).

------
ChuckMcM
I wish there was some way to express meta data like 'best paper' from trusted
sources into the web crawler space. This is an excellent compilation, and I've
added a half dozen papers to my tablet for later reading, but its a _human_
compilation. My thought is whether there might be an opportunity to flag
something such that a web crawler could automatically compile this sort of
list.

Challenges I see to that would be spam injection and author spoofing.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Actually, when you "search" for papers on a paticular topic, you need more
information that what was best paper; the "best" paper for a topic is probably
not distinguished in a conference that cover multiple topics!

Citation rank is one way to evaluate a bunch of papers on a paticular topic,
and its definitely one of the best way to find related papers in the first
place. However, citations are fairly easy to game (cite yourself, get your
colleagues to cite your paper) and therefore are not a great indicator of
quality/influence/impact. Next, the venue of the conference is important; an
OSDI paper will probably be pretty good given their low acceptance rate. But
you can find lots of noise even at the best first-tier venue; its not that
hard to get published (in CS) and many rising academics will flood the system
with papers to make their tenure case stronger (where the tenure committee is
not composed of peers, sheer numbers + conference rank are very important).

Sometimes you'll also find a gem in someone's dissertation 10 years back who
didn't really focus on publishing: if you don't pursue an academic career, you
don't have too much motivation to publish broadly. Or a good paper that was
never cited at all on some topic that was then just emerging or way before its
time. The quality of my own papers (as judged personally and subjectively) are
inversely related to their citation counts.

------
billy8988
Interesting! But each article costs 30+. How could a poor startup afford?

~~~
mindcrime
More than a few are freely available. But, FWIW, the IEEE and ACM are
notorious for charging ridiculous fees to access their papers, if you're not a
member. However, individual membership in both organizations is relatively
inexpensive (it's journal subscriptions that quickly drive up the price), and
can be worthwhile if you find yourself accessing a lot of academic papers of
this sort.

My take is that ACM, IEEE and AAAI are all worth maintaining memberships with,
especially if you want to stay up to date on what's going on at an academic
level. Maybe the biggest advantage of being a member of these orgs, other than
access to archived papers, is that subscriptions to their journals is _much_
cheaper if you're a member. YMMV, of course.

On a related note, at least one of IEEE, AAAI or ACM have a discount program
for journals published by other outfits, like Springer. Some deal like "join
ACM, and your subscription to $FOO from Springer is heavily discounted." If
you like to subscribe to journals and what-not, check out all these offers, as
they can bring the prices down to where an individual can actually afford
them, whereas normally you'd find the price to be so high that only an
institution could really justify it.

~~~
tjr
This is a nice service the ACM offers, though authors have to take advantage
of it for it to work: <http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-
service>

~~~
scott_s
I see it more as an appeal from the ACM to authors to keep the ACM in the
loop. Personally, I see it as a hassle, so no thanks.

If the ACM removed the paywall, I would link directly to the proper page for
each of my papers - there's excellent meta information on those pages, like
who we cite and who cites us. As well as author links which link to other
papers written by those authors.

I really want to somehow lobby the ACM and IEEE to remove their paywalls (I am
a member of both), but I have neither the time nor the knowledge of how to be
most effective.

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soperj
Next time he should just add a torrent with all the papers included, that way
we won't need to hunt down all the free versions of each paper.

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pom
Too bad it doesn't include posters... I would have made the list :(

------
GuiA
HCI guy here, surprised UIST is in the lot but not SIGCHI/TEI.

