Author Archives: wilson.mark.c

Chess and Computers

Garry Kasparov’s book review is a lot more interesting than the book probably is. A lot of really interesting anecdotes from one of the greatest chessplayers ever (perhaps the greatest). I remember following his first match with Karpov via the newspapers while at high school. Now my  local paper doesn’t cover any sort of chess news, and doesn’t even have a recreational column. I must try to do something about that sometime.

Scientific teaching

Last week I attended a talk by Carl Wieman about the approach to teaching science (at university level) that his eponymous Science Education Initiative promotes. Briefly, he advocates paying serious attention to the research literature on how students actually learn, which seems rather obvious but apparently is rarely done. Some of the statistics he gave were quite depressing: student recall of basic concepts as measured by standard tests is about 30% for traditional lecture courses, and students’ way of thinking is usually more novice-like after taking such courses than before. He advocates using “clickers” to allow instant anonymous feedback in lectures, and structuring lectures around key nonobvious questions to encourage student discussion.

I found it pretty compelling and hope to see it tried out in my own department soon.

Science and NZ prosperity

The NZ Institute’s discussion paper Standing on the Shoulders of Science and slides from a talk by Philip McCann (which I saw on Hard News) have come my way today. It seems that more urgency is being felt by decision-makers in NZ about the poor productivity growth of recent decades, and science R&D is being promoted more. I hope something actually happens, because these problems have been known for a long long time.

DIMACS 20th birthday

Today I attended the 20th birthday celebrations for DIMACS at Rutgers University. There were some nice talks: Ron Graham on addressing in graphs; Peter Winkler on combinatorics in statistical physics, Joan Feigenbaum on approximate privacy, Michael Trick on the DIMACS Challenges, Richard Karp on implicit set algorithms, Eva Tardos on games in networks, etc. There was also an interesting panel discussion on education (de facto national standards coming in the US are strongly opposed by some here, because of the de-emphasizing of discrete math topics) and industry (the environment is much meaner now, and managers are loath to fund projects without clearly stated benefits to the company). This was my first visit and I can see now why DIMACS has been so successful. Thanks to all the organizers and speakers for a very enjoyable day.

Note: another report by Muthu

CS conferences

The debate has flared up again, and I have only a little to contribute, but here it is.

Features of the present system, some of them very different from most other disciplines:

  • intense competition for acceptance into prestigious conferences
  • a very large number of conferences overall, most rather small
  • conference papers tend to be shorter with fewer details than journal papers
  • conference papers count as much, if not more than, journal papers
  • conference papers are not refereed as deeply as journal papers, but have to be acceptable to a broader audience
  • conference proceedings to some extent set the research agenda for the community

Negatives associated with these features:

  • too much emphasis on quantity over quality
  • too much emphasis on safe, easily packaged research
  • too high a pace of publication (as opposed to genuine innovation)
  • difficulty when deciding where to publish interdisciplinary research
  • too much cost (money, environmental impact) of all the conference travel

Solutions:

  • conference papers should not count toward evaluation of an individual researcher
  • professional bodies such as ACM and IEEE should hold fewer conferences (some large and general) and emphasize their journals
  • give more credit for writing reviews, surveys and books
  • use arXiv for all new papers, and create overlay journals

I realise that implementation of these may not be easy, but it has to start somewhere. I wonder whether some people in (T)CS have become addicted to a constant round of conference travel. It really doesn’t seem a good use of society’s resources.

Conferences could retain the role of setting the agenda, selecting the best papers and maintaining a sense of community, through invited plenary lectures, special sessions in trendy areas, etc. Fewer papers would be published, and less repetition would occur. Small invited workshops could still be held, to counterbalance the large open conferences. Reviews and surveys help to set the agenda and allocate attention efficiently, as do prizes and special sessions at meetings.  This system works fine for mathematics. At least for the more mathematical parts of CS, this would work. As for the more “engineering” oriented parts, IEEE also has journals, and requires fast referee reports. It should be possible to improve the CS journal system, if the vast amount of time spent on refereeing for conferences was spent instead on refereeing for journals.

A concrete suggestion for improving scientific papers

Change editorial policy so that all articles must contain a section labelled “Our contribution” that explicitly states how the paper in question improves on previous work, and why the reader should care about it. I got this idea from an article by Simon Peyton Jones but my contribution is to add the element of compulsion! It is amazing how many papers require the referee or reader to guess what the point of writing them was.

CS exceptionalism

The long-running debate among some members of the (theoretical) computer science community about its publishing habits has heated up again, after Lance Fortnow’s column to appear in CACM arguing for a reform of the competitive conference system, Noam Nisan’s “opposing” view and many comments on both blogs. Central to the debate seems to be the concern on one side that CS is out of step with practice in other disciplines, while the other side seem to believe that through luck or design, the younger field of CS has hit upon a superior model to other disciplines.

CS is a strange field, a mixture of mathematics and engineering, crudely speaking. There has been ongoing debate over whether CS is a science or part of engineering, and the two camps in the conference argument seem influenced by those who think CS is a science and those who think it is isn’t. I certainly belong to the first, although sometimes my faith is shaken. But surely CS will eventually be recognized as a mature science with substantial links with other disciplines. These should lead to its exceptional publishing culture changing almost automatically.

More on Iran situation

After several weeks of following the news obsessively, I need to get back to work. I thought some summary information might be helpful for others. Of course these sites are all in English. My Farsi reading level is like that of a primary school child, and Google Translate’s Persian alpha-version is not really adequate, so I am sticking to English mostly.

Background: general Iranian history; a nice diagram of the power structure in Iran; some key players; more description of Mousavi, Khamanei, Ahmadinejad; coup leaders;

Analysis: articles on politics by Mohammad Sahimi at TehranBureau; Juan Cole; Ali Ansari; statistical analysis of the election results by Walter Mebane and FiveThirtyEight.com;

News updates: Huffington Post; National Iranian-American Council blog; Windows on Iran;

Advocacy: Abdorahman Boroumand Foundation; ICHRI; Amnesty International; Haystack