Friday, June 20, 2008

FOCS and Euro

I finished watching a spectacular game at Euro 2008 between Turkey and Croatia. It went into overtime with both teams obviously stressed by the importance of the match. Croatia scored 3 minutes before the end of overtime, prompting a huge display of joy among supporters. But Turkey never stopped believing, and in minute 122 (two minutes past the official end of overtime and seconds before the final whistle) scored to tie the game. Then the joy of Turkish supporters made the Croatian moment seem like nothing. Turkey eventually won on penalty kicks.

I then returned to life, and checked to see why my Blackberry had been buzzing so much. I saw 4 accept notifications for FOCS 2008, and realized that supporters may cheer, but it's nothing like the feeling of joy for the players.

As always, my 4 submissions can be found on my papers page (top 4).

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on having all four papers accepted!

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on the papers!

About the rest of the stuff, I never understood the fuss about (roughly) 22 people chasing a ball on a field.

-- Metoo

Anonymous said...

Congratulations. Now that all your paper got accepted in FOCS, don't you want to count the number of previous rejections that got accepted into this FOCS? Even before knowing the whole list of FOCS, I know at least 4 STOC/SODA rejections that got accepted into this FOCS.

Mihai said...

A statistic about the number of STOC/SODA rejects that made it into FOCS would be interested. I only know one thus far, but it seems entirely reasonable that you may know 4.

Note however that, since STOC had some awful biases and overall taste, I would expect that many good papers got resubmitted and rightfully accepted. In other words, a bad conference makes the number be big for itself and the next conference.

Mihai said...

Muthu, it doesn't matter what the sport is, as long it has some action (which soccer definetely does), and the game is loaded with nationalistic sentiments :)

Anonymous said...

The list is up:

FOCS 2008 Accepted Papers

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! I think you also win the prize for least-informative paper titles. ;) I guess your original title to the one was just "Structures," and adding (Data) was a concession to the referee reports? Very amusing, anyway.

Anonymous said...

Mihai now that you have 4 papers in FOCS, to have fun let's have Guinness World Records for CS conferences (you may even want to a new post on it). Just say in each CS conference who has the maximum number of papers. To start I think in SOCG, Micha Sharir have 8 papers in SOCG 88. You can mention in each year or total. That is fun....

Anonymous said...

If someone compiles such a World Records list, it would be interesting to create both weighted and unweighted lists, where weighted means that the score of each paper is 1/(no. of authors).

Anonymous said...

where weighted means that the score of each paper is 1/(no. of authors).

Is there any reason why that should be the weight assigned?

Suppose you are stuck trying to prove some silly property. You can either bang your head against the wall for six months until you solve the problem and publish a single author paper or you can ask the expert next door and resolve the problem in an afternoon, in a joint publication. Which behavior should be rewarded? Which one leads to the advancement of science?

At the end of the day, the best researcher is the one who advances knowledge the most and in the most meaningful ways, not the one with most papers or most single author papers or most FOCS papers.

In DBLP, selecting venue:focs gives a list of the most prolific FOCS authors. They are quite a distinguished bunch, but it is far from the natural ranking of top theoreticians. Richard Karp, Turing award and Kyoto prize winner appears at #14 for one, Leslie Valiant doesn't make it to the top 40.