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Great Computer Science Papers?
slevin writes "Recently I listened to a talk by Alan Kay who mentioned that many 'new' software ideas had already been discovered decades earlier by computer scientists - but 'nobody reads these great papers anymore.' Over the years I have had the opportunity to read some really great and thought-provoking academic papers in Computer Science and would like to read more, but there are just too many to sort through. I'm wondering what great or seminal papers others have encountered. Since Google has no answers, perhaps we can come up with a list for the rest of the world?"
ACM and IEEE are just the places I would look for such papers. The proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM for example are a very good "filter" for the flood of papers on networking.
Does anyone know of a website where you can get access to comp sci and comp eng papers and stuff?
Try looking at arxiv.org and CiteSeer.
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As a PhD student, I often have to look for papers in the computer science field ; and very often, CiteSeer yields better results - or, rather, different results, but with a very good cross-referencing system. You can directly jump to the other papers cited by the paper you're reading, and you can see which papers did cite it, too.
The URL :
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
That said, I often find very interesting ideas in scientific papers, but sometimes things can't be implemented with current technology (I'm still talking about computer science domain, since that's what I know), or sometimes, the good idea in the paper is obsoleted a few years later.
For instance, I remember a scheduling algorithm to read disk blocks in a Video-On-Demand server : it was maybe very clever when it was written, when they had to feed 155 Mbps with a computer having 16 MB of RAM, but today, you have maybe 10 times more throughput, but 100 times more RAM - so you can use simpler, memory-hungry, buffering methods.
The problem is, that it's difficult (IMHO) to say "OK, this paper is theoretically interesting, but we can't implement this today, BUT we will probably be able to do it in a few (dozen) years", because you don't know what will and won't evolve (in my previous example, it was easy to predict that network bandwidth and memory size would increase, but it was maybe harder to guess that MPEG4 and DivX would allow the bitrate of a video stream to stay low...)