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With all this talk of publication output, I'd like to see some examples of good research coming out of mainland Chinese universities. In my field (programming

With all this talk of publication output, I'd like to see some examples of good research coming out of mainland Chinese universities. In my field (programming languages), I can name one total paper that I liked that came from a mainland Chinese university. It stood out for that reason. A friend in another field (CS theory) complained similarly: massive amounts of shoddy work comes out of China, but nothing worth reading. Meanwhile, China now has a spam journal called "Nature and Science," so you can tell your friends "I have 5 papers in Nature and Science."

LiweiZ 9y ago
What you observed is exact how we set the goal and play the game. As a Chinese, I think your observation is very insightful to point to the model/structure of these kind of advance measured by normal ways. But most people follow the normal fact checking measurement. That's one of the powerful way to manipulate people's perspectives by improving on some facts. In the end of the day, we all react to some signals.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Ah, can I ask what paper it is? I’m in PL, and unless it’s coming out of MSR China, I haven’t seen PL papers that are interesting. China isn’t into PL, though, and it gets better in systems (big data, cloud, whatever is hot these days), there are some good labs with good output (Andy Yao’s algo lab at qinghua). Many of the researchers are foreigners however (just like in the USA). I’m curious about the quality of published work coming out of china in ML. Has anyone who does ML research read recently a paper that came out of china that had something really useful to them in it? I think those are fairly good measures of output (a contribution found useful).
- Darmani 9y ago
  Hi Sean! We met a few weeks ago at OOPSLA. The paper I have in mind is Zhai et al's "Automatic Model Generation from Documentation for Java API Functions" presented at ICSE last year, from Nanjing University. It is arguably more of an SE paper though, and a lot of the authors are at US/Canadian universities; for all I know, she did most of the work in the US. Still, the number of good faculty who come from China is growing; it's only a matter of time before some of them choose to start research groups back home.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Mei Hong’s group among others do well enough at PKU in SE. Never saw anything out of NJU, interesting. China’s normal research faculty system is really messed up, more so than the American system. Special labs like Andy Yao’s are actually funded well (so no need to body shop your grad students to make ends meet), but seem to be the exception. Let’s see what happens.
    - Darmani 9y ago
      Body shop? Explain. How exactly is the system messed up.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        It’s like you as a professor have grad students in your lab, not just a few like a western professor, but maybe 10 or even 20. A company needs some work done, you need the money, your grad students need to graduate, so...they use the lab to do the work for the company, professor gets paid (important since their normal salary is 10k RMB/month or less), grad students get to graduate, company gets cheap labor.... It was really annoying to us because the professors would always keep their best students (especially undergrads, the good ones were better than grad students as they would go abroad and not become grad students in china) not allowing them to work for us as interns unless we had really tight guanxi with them. America is still 10 times better than china in this regards. Unless they root out the corruption, they are never going to advance beyond paper farms no matter how much money they throw at it.
        Darmani 9y ago
        Interesting. So, I understand that the grad students are not interested in the research. Are they writing papers on these "projects?" What good is a Chinese Ph. D. then? Some European (Belgian?) students told me that, in their country, it was common to have an "industry-funded" Ph. D. (hence all the people I've met doing DSLs for insurance companies). I wonder to what extent their system is similar.
- tanilama 9y ago
  I think China is huge in Computer Vision. And in terms of good Chinese papers ... there are really a lot of them in this Area, some of them are hugely influential.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Example? (Of very influential Chinese papers in computer vision)
    - tanilama 9y ago
      https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition Citation 4000+. Milestone of image recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852 https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852 Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification. Also known as PreLU, citation 1600+. The initialization scheme is widely adapted by a lot of following works. Those are the most influential ones, all come from Kaiming He. He is now in FAIR, and keeps very good publication record, with works like MASK-RCNN, but that doesn't really count as purely Chinese contribution, so we skipped here. Some recent memory: 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06211 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06211 2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01507 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01507 3. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01083 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01083 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06993 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06993 5. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01088 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01088 Those are all good papers.
      - Darmani 9y ago
        We asked about papers from universities in mainland China. You posted 7 papers. One of them had a second author from Shanghai Jiao Tong, and another had a second author from Tsinghua. The rest were from industry, MSR, and western universities. So, we had someone from another field go searching for examples of good research from mainland Chinese universities, and come up empty-handed. I think this counts as further evidence for mainland Chinese universities being paper farms. :) And, what do you know? Kaiming He did his Ph. D. in Hong Kong, not mainland China.

LiweiZ 9y ago

What you observed is exact how we set the goal and play the game. As a Chinese, I think your observation is very insightful to point to the model/structure of these kind of advance measured by normal ways. But most people follow the normal fact checking measurement. That's one of the powerful way to manipulate people's perspectives by improving on some facts. In the end of the day, we all react to some signals.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Ah, can I ask what paper it is? I’m in PL, and unless it’s coming out of MSR China, I haven’t seen PL papers that are interesting. China isn’t into PL, though, and it gets better in systems (big data, cloud, whatever is hot these days), there are some good labs with good output (Andy Yao’s algo lab at qinghua). Many of the researchers are foreigners however (just like in the USA). I’m curious about the quality of published work coming out of china in ML. Has anyone who does ML research read recently a paper that came out of china that had something really useful to them in it? I think those are fairly good measures of output (a contribution found useful).

Darmani 9y ago
Hi Sean! We met a few weeks ago at OOPSLA. The paper I have in mind is Zhai et al's "Automatic Model Generation from Documentation for Java API Functions" presented at ICSE last year, from Nanjing University. It is arguably more of an SE paper though, and a lot of the authors are at US/Canadian universities; for all I know, she did most of the work in the US. Still, the number of good faculty who come from China is growing; it's only a matter of time before some of them choose to start research groups back home.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Mei Hong’s group among others do well enough at PKU in SE. Never saw anything out of NJU, interesting. China’s normal research faculty system is really messed up, more so than the American system. Special labs like Andy Yao’s are actually funded well (so no need to body shop your grad students to make ends meet), but seem to be the exception. Let’s see what happens.
  - Darmani 9y ago
    Body shop? Explain. How exactly is the system messed up.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      It’s like you as a professor have grad students in your lab, not just a few like a western professor, but maybe 10 or even 20. A company needs some work done, you need the money, your grad students need to graduate, so...they use the lab to do the work for the company, professor gets paid (important since their normal salary is 10k RMB/month or less), grad students get to graduate, company gets cheap labor.... It was really annoying to us because the professors would always keep their best students (especially undergrads, the good ones were better than grad students as they would go abroad and not become grad students in china) not allowing them to work for us as interns unless we had really tight guanxi with them. America is still 10 times better than china in this regards. Unless they root out the corruption, they are never going to advance beyond paper farms no matter how much money they throw at it.
      - Darmani 9y ago
        Interesting. So, I understand that the grad students are not interested in the research. Are they writing papers on these "projects?" What good is a Chinese Ph. D. then? Some European (Belgian?) students told me that, in their country, it was common to have an "industry-funded" Ph. D. (hence all the people I've met doing DSLs for insurance companies). I wonder to what extent their system is similar.
tanilama 9y ago
I think China is huge in Computer Vision. And in terms of good Chinese papers ... there are really a lot of them in this Area, some of them are hugely influential.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Example? (Of very influential Chinese papers in computer vision)
  - tanilama 9y ago
    https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition Citation 4000+. Milestone of image recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852 https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852 Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification. Also known as PreLU, citation 1600+. The initialization scheme is widely adapted by a lot of following works. Those are the most influential ones, all come from Kaiming He. He is now in FAIR, and keeps very good publication record, with works like MASK-RCNN, but that doesn't really count as purely Chinese contribution, so we skipped here. Some recent memory: 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06211 https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06211 2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01507 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01507 3. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01083 https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01083 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06993 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06993 5. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01088 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01088 Those are all good papers.
    - Darmani 9y ago
      We asked about papers from universities in mainland China. You posted 7 papers. One of them had a second author from Shanghai Jiao Tong, and another had a second author from Tsinghua. The rest were from industry, MSR, and western universities. So, we had someone from another field go searching for examples of good research from mainland Chinese universities, and come up empty-handed. I think this counts as further evidence for mainland Chinese universities being paper farms. :) And, what do you know? Kaiming He did his Ph. D. in Hong Kong, not mainland China.