tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post8190535592855353285..comments2024-03-18T23:13:09.570-05:00Comments on Computational Complexity: Are Conferences Discriminatory? Lance Fortnowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06752030912874378610noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-40007047886693651282018-09-11T06:49:31.036-05:002018-09-11T06:49:31.036-05:00Fourth Edition of my P vs NP solutions:
http://vi...Fourth Edition of my P vs NP solutions:<br /><br />http://vixra.org/abs/1809.0204Yuly Shipilevskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13699450530150796472noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-85799348768444598902018-09-08T13:34:40.748-05:002018-09-08T13:34:40.748-05:00I was recently at APPROX/RANDOM and it appeared po...I was recently at APPROX/RANDOM and it appeared poorly attended and made me question the expense and time to attend. These days, with most papers available on the ArXiv even before the conference submission, there is less incentive for people to go to conferences. For the most part I think conferences in TCS (and perhaps other CS fields as well) are serving as stamps of peer-review. One of the main advantages of going to conferences is to hear work not directly related to one's own, but given limited resources and other constraints, I think it is not feasible for many of us to attend more than one big conference. I think it makes sense to co-locate conferences like ALGO does in Europe rather than have multiple smaller ones. STOC/Theory fest is good but some one who needs to go to another major conference and a workshop may also find it difficult to attend it. I think it is useful to think about the issues of cost/benefit ratio of smaller conferences/workshops that are held in isolation.Chandrahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00057069075567569157noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-85035565301716397512018-09-07T09:23:46.341-05:002018-09-07T09:23:46.341-05:00meh the four be with youmeh the four be with youAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-84883006361261859932018-09-07T08:34:24.595-05:002018-09-07T08:34:24.595-05:00I definitely sympathize with this as someone who i...I definitely sympathize with this as someone who is at a smaller non-elite private college that has barely enough funding for one (non-international) conference a year. Many smaller schools have even less funding, which effectively shuts out their faculty from computer science research.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-70656589267602058072018-09-07T07:19:18.630-05:002018-09-07T07:19:18.630-05:00Using the word "discriminatory" goes too...Using the word "discriminatory" goes too far. Is it harder for people in certain countries outside the US to attend conferences in the US? Yes. But it is also harder for people in the US who don't live near a major airport; for people who lack travel money; for people who are sick and find travel difficult; for people who have pets and have no one to care for their pets while they are away; for people with religious restrictions against traveling on or around certain holidays; etc., etc. Are these unfortunate? Yes. Should we, as a community do what we can to improve the situation? To an extent, sure. Is this "discrimination"? Hardly.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-30175554123765420992018-09-06T18:00:13.485-05:002018-09-06T18:00:13.485-05:00Each conference publication costs between $1500 an...Each conference publication costs between $1500 and $3000, depending on the cost of the plane ticket, accommodation, and registration fee required to present it. I can easily afford this with grants now, and if I didn't have grants, my faculty salary is large enough to afford it from my discretionary income.<br /><br />But as a grad student, my advisor rarely had money, so I paid for all my own conference travel. That was only possible because of very scrupulous saving of my tiny stipend, and the fact that I lived in a low-cost-of-living region of the country.<br /><br />I have never figured out an incentive system to give conference student travel awards only to those students who truly need it (i.e., those students who have a paper to present and whose advisors/departments are unwilling or unable to fund the travel). Until we have such a system, requiring conference publications is a winner-take-all system that discriminates heavily against students who are not already successful (i.e., work for a grant-wealthy advisor).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-2327186279872100172018-09-06T15:43:20.235-05:002018-09-06T15:43:20.235-05:00I'll be anonymous for this one. In CS, confere...I'll be anonymous for this one. In CS, conferences serve two functions -- 1. they put a stamp of peer-review on a paper and 2. they serve as promotional venues where others get to hear about one's work. <br /><br />I am in a sub-field of CS that has seen *tremendous* growth over the past 6-7 years. Conferences have grown in size by a factor of close to 10! Because of this reason, the conferences have become useless for 2. If there are 500-600 papers in a conference, noone notices if you published one and what you published. <br /><br />Let me assure you -- this has made it a *hundred* times harder for junior faculty in mid-level schools -- eg, those who are not superstars at the time of graduation -- to get their work out and to get cited. These are the folks who need exposure the most, and in the current system, they don't get any. No-one notices or reads their conference papers, and they don't (yet) get invited to the more exclusive workshops that superstars and senior faculty get invited to. The more enterprising folks go around the country and give many talks -- but this is a very inefficient way of publicizing. <br /><br />The demise of the conference as a promotional venue has in fact *increased* inequality, not diminished it, and has made it even harder for folks with travel constraints, such as folks with caregiving responsibilities, to get the word out about their work.<br /><br />Of course different fields are different, but this is how things have worked out in my field. <br /> Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-51059638490019815312018-09-06T08:58:54.889-05:002018-09-06T08:58:54.889-05:00I feel that this discussion discriminates based on...I feel that this discussion discriminates based on whether you've got a twitter account or not...domhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05790539025733385232noreply@blogger.com