Just guessing based on the authors’ names and their affiliation with Alibaba Group, but I think this research was published by exclusively Chinese citizens.
In my experience, it’s difficult to operate a small, personal website from within China because of their regulations in regards to non-government websites. Because of this, you will often find that Chinese citizens will use approved (or at least unrestricted) services like GitHub pages.
Having worked closely with many businesses based in China due to my hobbies, I have noted that services like Google Docs and Drive are favored for this reason.
I would guess there are ways to host content like this more easily on platforms that are only accessible within China or are not navigable without the user understanding Chinese language.
I would also guess that this is part of the reason why services that target customers in China tend to become “super apps” that combine several services that non-Chinese users would expect to find on disparate sites. For example, services may combine a social media style newsfeed/interaction API, banking, email, shopping, and food delivery into a single platform.
Nope, but I can see why you’d think that. Honestly, I wanted to choose my words carefully because of the often politically charged tone that can often be interpreted/intended when uttering the word “China.”
I studied Chinese language, art, history, politics, and culture in university and lived in Shanghai after graduating. While I lived there, I helped some friends setup some domains for hosted GMail/e-commerce and learned some interesting things about business there.
I also spend some of my spare time finding vulnerabilities in hardware devices and building my own small electronics/maker projects. This has given me ample opportunities to work with (i.e. get help from or provide feedback to) many different companies based in China.
Because it's basically free webhosting and you don't need to manage registering a domain?
I don't know for sure, but that's my guess. You could achieve something similar with S3, but you need a credit card attached, and then you need to worry about whose credit card, and what if it gets unexpected traffic and who will pay...
You could use Google Sites as well, but then you need to buy a domain, which again means requiring a credit card, and whose responsibility is it to pay and for how many years?
I don't think it's mostly about the cost, I think it's mostly about just not having to link a credit card?
I'm fine with them hosting on Github but they have a link that specifically says "Code" that takes you to a relatively empty github repo with no code. Hopefully, putting the actual code on github is a work in progress.
At least based on my observations it's been common practice in ML papers for some years already. Usually releasing Github hosted project page and a repository with the same information, then releasing the code on that repo afterwards at some point.
I don't feel that's an issue. A lot more people are able to see what's happening on the bleeding edge than if they'd just release the paper without accompanying demo page, and faster than if they'd wait for the code to be ready for release? Of course one can argue that "they should just release whatever code they have instantly", but that's their choice if they want to clean it up, remove secrets etc.
When researchers finish papers often they are too exhausted to choose anything beyond the "easiest" path, in this case maybe using an existing template and a gh pages website to attract publicity.
(I know people are often too exhausted to even upload the preprint... They take a break and upload later)
