5 ms·

That guy Felix Heide is a research powerhouse. He and his group published 4 papers in SIGGRAPH 21, 7 papers in CVPR 21 and 6 papers in CVPR 2020, wow. https://

That guy Felix Heide is a research powerhouse. He and his group published 4 papers in SIGGRAPH 21, 7 papers in CVPR 21 and 6 papers in CVPR 2020, wow. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~fheide/ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~fheide/

sjtindell 5y ago
Are we seeing more people on this path where you get tenure (has to be one of the most secure jobs possible) and then launch companies from that foundation? It meshes so well, incredibly competitive though. Perhaps I’m just noticing more.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  It sounds like in the case of Felix, he started his company while he was a Ph.D. student.
sytelus 5y ago
This usually implies he has great funding sources and very large lab. Being a "powerhouse" as a researcher is probably a different thing.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  I know nothing about this person, but if his case is the average, he's probably got a lot of grad students doing the actual work. I can't tell you how many papers/patents I wrote only to be listed as the 5th contributor or some such thing.
  - rudyfink 5y ago
    I'd love to see a paper looking at this (e.g., how often is the "primary" author the last author or is the last author a better predictor of quality than the first, if you look back historically). I suspect this is very widespread issue.
    - detaro 5y ago
      If you look at the linked list of papers, the prof usually appears at the end of the list. That's common in computing fields.
    - tokai 5y ago
      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157712000491 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175115771...
  - voxl 5y ago
    https://light.princeton.edu/team/ https://light.princeton.edu/team/ Visiting professor, 3 postdocs, and 9 PhD students, all of very high quality (because, well they're at Princeton). My guess is each postdoc could produce 1 to 2 papers a year on there own. A PhD student at such a difficult school can probably produce one paper a year once they are in there third year. 14 publications in 2021. Let's guess 6 of which are from postdocs, we'll say 4 of which are from PhD students, leaving us with 4 publications between both professors, or two from each. Of course, this is all very rough estimation.
    - shrimpx 5y ago
      The way it likely works is the prof drives the vast majority of idea/IP development and the students do the work under the prof's guidance. Then the prof "frames" the paper and does part of the writing, especially in intro and conclusion sections. These profs likely don't drive any solo projects and don't do any prof-prof collaborations without students involved.
      - derbOac 5y ago
        The problem is we will never know what really happened. This model leads to a necessary accrual of credit to more senior researchers because the default assumption is to assume credit of a group to the more senior individual. The problem is there's no way (or less way) for the less senior individual to establish credit unless they are publishing on their own, which isn't feasible. In this way, group efforts tend to trickle toward the person in the senior position, and credit accrues to people in management of large groups irrespective of where ideas are coming from or who is doing the work. We say "someone is a great scientist" because they have an administrative position with reference to a large group. Whoever has the most papers with the largest groups wins.
randomsearch 5y ago
I know nothing of his work, and he may well be an excellent researcher, but the use of “number of papers published” as a proxy for the quality of someone’s research is one of the biggest problems in academia. What matters is the precise nature of a researcher’s work, which is a qualitative measure that cannot be summarised with a simplistic metric. It’s so odd that we even discuss such things; it’s an overused analogy but “that Einstein publishes 5 PLA papers a year” vs “that dude developed the theory of general relativity” is so revealing. Don’t mean to pick on you personally, but as the top voted comment it feels like we’re rewarding this harmful perspective on academia. I’d like to say “academia needs to mature” but the problem is actually that it’s gone backwards, and undoing that invasion of management consultant culture and subsequent game playing into a somewhat altruistic and intellectual vocation seems like a very hard problem.
- boibombeiro 5y ago
  The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields. It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion. I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering, with the waterfall methodology. Publising the research incrementally allows more people to get involved, create more branches, and spot errors earlier. In sofware developement, the change of the process lead to huge advanvements. I believe this is also true for academia.
  - randomsearch 5y ago
    > It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken. I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science. More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.

sjtindell 5y ago

Are we seeing more people on this path where you get tenure (has to be one of the most secure jobs possible) and then launch companies from that foundation? It meshes so well, incredibly competitive though. Perhaps I’m just noticing more.

shrimpx 5y ago
It sounds like in the case of Felix, he started his company while he was a Ph.D. student.

sytelus 5y ago

This usually implies he has great funding sources and very large lab. Being a "powerhouse" as a researcher is probably a different thing.

oceanghost 5y ago
I know nothing about this person, but if his case is the average, he's probably got a lot of grad students doing the actual work. I can't tell you how many papers/patents I wrote only to be listed as the 5th contributor or some such thing.
- rudyfink 5y ago
  I'd love to see a paper looking at this (e.g., how often is the "primary" author the last author or is the last author a better predictor of quality than the first, if you look back historically). I suspect this is very widespread issue.
  - detaro 5y ago
    If you look at the linked list of papers, the prof usually appears at the end of the list. That's common in computing fields.
  - tokai 5y ago
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157712000491 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175115771...
- voxl 5y ago
  https://light.princeton.edu/team/ https://light.princeton.edu/team/ Visiting professor, 3 postdocs, and 9 PhD students, all of very high quality (because, well they're at Princeton). My guess is each postdoc could produce 1 to 2 papers a year on there own. A PhD student at such a difficult school can probably produce one paper a year once they are in there third year. 14 publications in 2021. Let's guess 6 of which are from postdocs, we'll say 4 of which are from PhD students, leaving us with 4 publications between both professors, or two from each. Of course, this is all very rough estimation.
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    The way it likely works is the prof drives the vast majority of idea/IP development and the students do the work under the prof's guidance. Then the prof "frames" the paper and does part of the writing, especially in intro and conclusion sections. These profs likely don't drive any solo projects and don't do any prof-prof collaborations without students involved.
    - derbOac 5y ago
      The problem is we will never know what really happened. This model leads to a necessary accrual of credit to more senior researchers because the default assumption is to assume credit of a group to the more senior individual. The problem is there's no way (or less way) for the less senior individual to establish credit unless they are publishing on their own, which isn't feasible. In this way, group efforts tend to trickle toward the person in the senior position, and credit accrues to people in management of large groups irrespective of where ideas are coming from or who is doing the work. We say "someone is a great scientist" because they have an administrative position with reference to a large group. Whoever has the most papers with the largest groups wins.

randomsearch 5y ago

I know nothing of his work, and he may well be an excellent researcher, but the use of “number of papers published” as a proxy for the quality of someone’s research is one of the biggest problems in academia. What matters is the precise nature of a researcher’s work, which is a qualitative measure that cannot be summarised with a simplistic metric. It’s so odd that we even discuss such things; it’s an overused analogy but “that Einstein publishes 5 PLA papers a year” vs “that dude developed the theory of general relativity” is so revealing. Don’t mean to pick on you personally, but as the top voted comment it feels like we’re rewarding this harmful perspective on academia. I’d like to say “academia needs to mature” but the problem is actually that it’s gone backwards, and undoing that invasion of management consultant culture and subsequent game playing into a somewhat altruistic and intellectual vocation seems like a very hard problem.

boibombeiro 5y ago
The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields. It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion. I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering, with the waterfall methodology. Publising the research incrementally allows more people to get involved, create more branches, and spot errors earlier. In sofware developement, the change of the process lead to huge advanvements. I believe this is also true for academia.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  > It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken. I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken. I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science. More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.