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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" pres

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.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Think of it like a very focused internship. You still get something out of it (you did the work after all!), but it’s not like you got to explore your own thing and there was a lot more grunt work involved; since the professor had 20 student you also got a lot of experience in managing other students (senior PhDs will direct junior PhDs and master students, who will direct undergrads if any, you might rarely see the professor unless you are at the top of the lab). In that sense, many employers might find a chinese grad degree more preferable to a western one. On the other hand, research breakthroughs are much less likely.

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.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Think of it like a very focused internship. You still get something out of it (you did the work after all!), but it’s not like you got to explore your own thing and there was a lot more grunt work involved; since the professor had 20 student you also got a lot of experience in managing other students (senior PhDs will direct junior PhDs and master students, who will direct undergrads if any, you might rarely see the professor unless you are at the top of the lab). In that sense, many employers might find a chinese grad degree more preferable to a western one. On the other hand, research breakthroughs are much less likely.