The call for nominations for the Test of Time Award at FOCS 2024 has been posted here.
Eligibility and past winners are here.
Points
1) It is good to have an award that waits until the dust settles and we can see what was really important.
2) The winners are all excellent papers that really have passed the test of time.
3) And of course it is really important that they appeared in FOCS. NO IT ISN"T! See next point
4) I would prefer a test-of-time award that is independent of WHERE the paper first appeared. Tying it to FOCS or STOCS or FOCS-or-STOC seems bad. I would opt for appearing in ANY journal or conference. Appearing in a journal of low quality is not a problem since this award should be for papers that are judged on their merit and influence, and not on their pedigree.
5) My proposal to allow any journal or conference may be impractical because some organization has to give it out, and if that organization is IEEE or ACM they will restrict to their own publications.
6) STOC also has a test of time award, see here 76) I tried to find out of the SODA conference has a test of time award but mostly got hits about the Baking Soda Test for determining if a pregnant women is going to have a boy or girl. It actually worlds 50% of the time! See here
7) I was not able to find any other test-of-time award for Comp Sci THEORY.
8) I DID find test of time awards for
SIGCSE- Comp Sci Education, here. Must be for a paper published in a conference co-sponsored by SIGCSE or in an ACM journal. So an excellent paper published elsewhere wouldn't count.
SC2- High Performanc Computing, see here. Paper must have been published in the SC conference.
ACM CCS - Security, Audit(?) and Control, see here I think these must appear in the CCS conference.
LICS (Logic in Computer Science) also has a Test of Time Award.
ReplyDeleteIn CS it has been fairly common to have conference-based test of time awards. For example, in systems areas: PLDI, Eurosys, Micro, HPCA, USENIX, are just some that have them. There is a nice advantage of having a constrained set of candidates and there is plenty of deserving work where the influence has been clear, particularly at the longer time frames.
ReplyDeleteFOCS started giving awards first and then STOC followed suit a year or two later with the same basic rules.
We already have the Godel Prize for theory papers that appear in journals.
ReplyDeleteCRYPTO also has a test of time award
ReplyDelete