3 ms·

As a biologist, where we emphasize publication over conferences, I am really curious as to what "best" means? Innovative? Most data to back hypothesis?

barik 13y ago
In CS, conference papers act much like journal papers (though often quite a bit shorter). Unlike journal papers, a talk or poster (by one of the authors) is also required to be presented at the conference in order to have the paper published. Though there are exceptions, the majority of these conferences are published in either ACM or IEEE libraries. The Best Paper Award is typically some combination of a decision by the Program Committee, aggregated votes by attendees of the conference, and input from the paper reviewers who originally peer-reviewed the work. There isn't a single metric for the award, and it can be quite subjective: sometimes it is an innovate topic, sometimes it is simply an interesting perspective, sometimes it is a well-executed presentation (even if the research itself wasn't all that interesting), sometimes it is because the authors used a difficult-to-acquire or real-world data set (internal Google or Microsoft data, game data directly from Blizzard), sometimes it is because of a challenging participant base (for example, interviewing minorities in elementary schools or a longitudinal study tracking participants over a decade), and sometimes it is simply excellent experimental design and statistical analysis.
scott_s 13y ago
In support of barik's comment, I want to add that conference papers in computer science are peer reviewed, and the top conferences have an acceptance rate that is usually less than 15%. Simply, conference papers, rather than journal articles, is where most innovative computer science work goes. This is very true for systems, languages, software engineering, databases and HCI, but less so for the more theoretical areas. This topic comes up when talking with researchers outside of computer science so often that the Computer Science Research Association wrote up a memo explaining it: http://cra.org/resources/bp-view/evaluating_computer_scientists_and_engineers_for_promotion_and_tenure/ http://cra.org/resources/bp-view/evaluating_computer_scienti...
- wbsun 13y ago
  Peer review doesn't necessarily mean anything objective unless it is totally doubly-blinded, which, ironically, is not used by many top system conferences.

barik 13y ago

In CS, conference papers act much like journal papers (though often quite a bit shorter). Unlike journal papers, a talk or poster (by one of the authors) is also required to be presented at the conference in order to have the paper published. Though there are exceptions, the majority of these conferences are published in either ACM or IEEE libraries. The Best Paper Award is typically some combination of a decision by the Program Committee, aggregated votes by attendees of the conference, and input from the paper reviewers who originally peer-reviewed the work. There isn't a single metric for the award, and it can be quite subjective: sometimes it is an innovate topic, sometimes it is simply an interesting perspective, sometimes it is a well-executed presentation (even if the research itself wasn't all that interesting), sometimes it is because the authors used a difficult-to-acquire or real-world data set (internal Google or Microsoft data, game data directly from Blizzard), sometimes it is because of a challenging participant base (for example, interviewing minorities in elementary schools or a longitudinal study tracking participants over a decade), and sometimes it is simply excellent experimental design and statistical analysis.

scott_s 13y ago

In support of barik's comment, I want to add that conference papers in computer science are peer reviewed, and the top conferences have an acceptance rate that is usually less than 15%. Simply, conference papers, rather than journal articles, is where most innovative computer science work goes. This is very true for systems, languages, software engineering, databases and HCI, but less so for the more theoretical areas. This topic comes up when talking with researchers outside of computer science so often that the Computer Science Research Association wrote up a memo explaining it: http://cra.org/resources/bp-view/evaluating_computer_scientists_and_engineers_for_promotion_and_tenure/ http://cra.org/resources/bp-view/evaluating_computer_scienti...

wbsun 13y ago
Peer review doesn't necessarily mean anything objective unless it is totally doubly-blinded, which, ironically, is not used by many top system conferences.