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IMO the implication that the "in-person conference" nature of the forum is what led to its demise rather than its capture by academics/abandonment by industry p
by khuey 1y ago
IMO the implication that the "in-person conference" nature of the forum is what led to its demise rather than its capture by academics/abandonment by industry practitioners is incorrect. I think a better summary of the cause is that most academic research is not that relevant to industry but academics need the prestige of forums like Usenix ATC in a way that industry does not which naturally leads to squeezing industry (and thus much of the relevance) out of the forum over time. I think the same would have happened to a virtual conference/printed journal/etc.
- bcantrill 1y agoI definitely agree with you, and apologies if that didn't come through in the piece! (Perhaps the rare case where I undershot on the metaphors?) One thing I didn't mention but certainly believe: academics were attracted to USENIX ATC because of its attendance count (especially at the height of the Dot Com boom when it had nearly 2,000 attendees!) -- but no one really took apart who was attending or what they were looking for. So the conference became more academic because of the attendee count -- but that it became more academic also drove the attendee count down. (I heard from a lot of practitioners who attended that they struggled to find sessions that were relevant to their work in even the broadest sense.) I know I link to it in the piece, but I think Rik Farrow's piece[0] really got right to the heart of all of this. [0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fall16_01_farrow.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fal...
- khuey 1y agoI didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with anything other than that specific point (which perhaps is more nostalgia for the halcyon days of in-person conferences than anything else). I do think that you correctly identified a major source of the problem back in 2004 as economic factors. I was at Mozilla when Rust was built (though not directly involved) and the sum of Mozilla's investment into Rust over the years easily broke into the 8 digits. Google's investment in Go I'm sure is an order of magnitude or two more than that. This is simply beyond the capacity of any academic institution or grant process. The only academic efforts that get to this level require Acts of Congress (e.g. LIGO, the Human Genome Project, the James Webb Space Telescope, etc). And anyone who can afford to drop $10M+ into development can find channels for distributing and publicizing their work that don't go through program committees. Open source is definitely a big part of that but I don't think that's the whole story. I'd certainly count CUDA as a major advance in systems software since 2004, for instance.
- abetusk 1y agoI don't feel like I have a good understanding of all the context but I don't think that's the implication at all. The post does offhandedly mention that doing online only conferences get "more bang for the buck" but the rest of the post and linked articles and talks discuss other aspects and, in my opinion, mirror your last sentiment about it happening to all conferences and journals. For example, one of the linked talks from 2016 "A Wardrobe for the Emperor" [0] talks about adding a more social website features (stars, likes, comments, feedback, etc.) to arXiv to improve it. He also talks about the "Papers we love" meetups, which are in person. I think the Usenix ATC is a highlighting a deeper problem and that it is happening across other conferences, journals and disciplines. I don't have a good theory of why. I think Cantrill's observations are part of the puzzle but I don't have a good sense for why things changed so drastically (and I think they have, compared to 20-40 years ago). [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAEiXWO44bQ&t=3457s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAEiXWO44bQ&t=3457s
- glitchc 1y agoThe big issue may be companies clamping down on divulging details regarding vulnerabilities and mitigations. Cybersecurity is significantly more weaponized now than it was in the 90s and companies might be facing immense pressure to limit the wrong kind of attention.
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoI don't think academics view ATC as particularly highly prestigious. Just within systems there are many other conferences which are either more, or just as, prestigious as ATC: OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGCOMM, EuroSys. Especially the first three are viewed to be much higher prestige than ATC, at least from my perspective.
- linguae 1y agoI used to be a grad student in a file systems lab at UC Santa Cruz over a decade ago. It was considered a dream to publish in OSDI or SOSP; our lab’s most successful paper was the OSDI 2006 paper on Ceph. We also thought very highly of VLDB, though most of our work was outside the interests of the database community. We regularly published in USENIX FAST and made occasional appearances at USENIX ATC.
- bcantrill 1y agoI really don't care about how prestigious academics view (or viewed) ATC, but for whatever it's worth when our paper was accepted in 2004, was just under 13%. That is bluntly too oversubscribed for the practitioner (whose job is to ship systems, not win paper popularity contests -- or adjudicate those popularity contests by serving on program committees). In some ways, if ATC wasn't thought prestigious, it's even worse -- it means that practitioners lost our conference for nothing at all. A final note: given that OSDI is on your list of prestigious conferences, the way the program committee was conducted in 2010 (which I outlined in my ATC keynote[0]) should be particularly galling. [0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-emperor-stitching-practical-bias-into-systems-software-research?slide=34 https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-emperor...