> I could ask them to go look up papers in Oakland, CCS and NDSS over the last couple of years and see if anything catches their fancy.
Isn't this exactly the major thing that is wrong with research today? Limiting work/creativity to a few well known conferences done by elites for elites? I read blog posts, posted daily here on HN, that are way more informative, honest, and replicable than many papers published in the three conferences you named.
> "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field.
Elite status happens exactly because there are conferences like the ones you mentioned. If you work with an advisor that publishes in Oakland, your chances of getting a paper in Oakland gets increased multiplicatively. And hint, that's not because your ideas (or papers) are better than anybody else's.
> The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards.
This is already happening. Look at all the "prestigious" conferences.
> where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff.
Who cares? If the work is worth anything, people will cite it. If not, it will remain as is. Why does it matter? Why do you care if 10 people cited your work or 100 people if you are happy with the work?
Unfortunately, nobody in this forsaken field (computer science) cares about the scientific aspect of the field anymore; everybody wants their name to be known and that's all there is to it. The measure of success is how many papers you publish in elite conferences ...
I do actually think that by breaking down all the barriers people care less about having their name in conference X or Y and more about the scientific aspect or citation cartels. First one is good, second one can be fixed (at least more easily than giving a few elites lots of power with no checks and balances).
> Isn't this exactly the major thing that is wrong with research today? Limiting work/creativity to a few well known conferences done by elites for elites? I read blog posts, posted daily here on HN, that are way more informative, honest, and replicable than many papers published in the three conferences you named.
I totally disagree. The quality of papers at the "elite" conferences is way higher than most things I've read on HN. What is an example of an HN post that in your opinion is better than equivalent academic research in that area?
> Elite status happens exactly because there are conferences like the ones you mentioned. If you work with an advisor that publishes in Oakland, your chances of getting a paper in Oakland gets increased multiplicatively. And hint, that's not because your ideas (or papers) are better than anybody else's.
Sure, having an advisor on the Oakland PC helps a great deal. But it doesn't follow that your work is just the same as everyone else. Have you peer reviewed papers for these conferences? A majority of submissions, even at the "elite" conferences are just junk. That doesn't mean everything that gets published is not junk, but the stuff that does get published is significantly better than the average submission.
> Who cares? If the work is worth anything, people will cite it. If not, it will remain as is. Why does it matter? Why do you care if 10 people cited your work or 100 people if you are happy with the work?
Because the point of my research is not to sit in an ivory tower and produce academese that no one cares about. The goal is to have real impact on computer system design, and in my specific case, push practitioners towards methodologies that make systems more secure. That's not going to happen if no one reads our work.
Another way of looking at it is that a lot of our work is funded by taxpayer money. They aren't paying us to have fun proving lemmas that no one else cares about, the taxpayer would like us to produce research that results in tangible improvements in computer system design. In the system that we have today, the only way to have this tangible impact is to produce high quality papers that other people read, cite and build on top of.
Isn't this exactly the major thing that is wrong with research today? Limiting work/creativity to a few well known conferences done by elites for elites? I read blog posts, posted daily here on HN, that are way more informative, honest, and replicable than many papers published in the three conferences you named.
> "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field.
Elite status happens exactly because there are conferences like the ones you mentioned. If you work with an advisor that publishes in Oakland, your chances of getting a paper in Oakland gets increased multiplicatively. And hint, that's not because your ideas (or papers) are better than anybody else's.
> The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards.
This is already happening. Look at all the "prestigious" conferences.
> where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff.
Who cares? If the work is worth anything, people will cite it. If not, it will remain as is. Why does it matter? Why do you care if 10 people cited your work or 100 people if you are happy with the work?
Unfortunately, nobody in this forsaken field (computer science) cares about the scientific aspect of the field anymore; everybody wants their name to be known and that's all there is to it. The measure of success is how many papers you publish in elite conferences ...
I do actually think that by breaking down all the barriers people care less about having their name in conference X or Y and more about the scientific aspect or citation cartels. First one is good, second one can be fixed (at least more easily than giving a few elites lots of power with no checks and balances).