Your paper is silly, smells, and is ugly, ugly…

Jonathan M. Smith has an interesting idea on how to avoid blackballing in tech paper reviews.

For those not clued in (or fortunate enough to have avoided academic paper submission follies), in order to have an academic paper accepted, one must submit to double-blind review by anonymous experts in the field to evaluate whether a paper is interesting and appropriate to the conference venue without being dazzled (or tainted) by knowledge of who actually wrote it.

While in theory this approach seems quite reasonable, in practice one tends to find that papers which push the envelope, contain ideas not within the accepted compact, or even radically new treatise often meet with less-than, shall we say, open-minded and even-handed analysis?

And since it’s pretty easy to guess who’s paper it is anyways, or even find out using a google search on the keywords, which everyone does anyway to figure out if “someone else wrote something like this before, so I can use their results in my analysis”, the “double” in double-blind doesn’t really work.

So Mr. Miller has proposed (at SIGCOMM in the OO session) a simple process: 1) That all reviews be public, and 2) signed by the reviewer. According to Mr. Miller, “That way history gets to see who was right – and who was wrong.”

Sounds good to me – I’m willing to take on the judgement of history in my work, since that’s only rational. Any other takers?

Robotics and the Next Generation

Went to the 2004 First Robotics Regional Competition in Silicon Valley, held at San Jose State University. And it was awesome to see all these kids running their “bots” through the paces. Got some great footage, even though Los Gatos High School’s robot broke midway through competition.

Seeing the excitement, the fun, and the high-tech hijinks reminded me of the days when we were putting together workstations on-the-fly in a Berkeley workstation spin-out called Symmetric Computer Systems. I haven’t seen this kind of serious fun for a long time in the computer biz.

Maybe we should all be building bots…