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Quitting the Graphics Field Over SIGGRAPH
An anonymous reader writes "A Professor at Stony Brook university has quit the field of computer graphics. He claims too much importance is given to one particular conference (SIGGRAPH) and that acceptance of papers in this conference has too much importance in terms of the careers (tenure, grants etc) of a researcher. Furthermore he claims the paper reviewing for SIGGRAPH is not fair and bright and novel papers are summarily rejected because they are either not from a 'hot' field or because the reviewer does not understand the concept and is not willing to spend time understanding it. He has started a discussion forum which has comments from several big names in the field including the papers chair of SIGGRAPH 2007."
There once was a boy who was hired to work on a construction crew. He was proud to be doing something useful and productive. The forman set him to tossing building stone over a wall.
The boy labored hard and was proud to have moved the pile of stone in record time. Surely this would show his usefullness and move up in the crew heirarchy in time.
The boy went to the forman and asked what task he should perform next.
"Throw 'em back over the wall," said the forman.
"What?" yelled the boy. "Why did you have me throw them over the wall in the first place if you were just going to have me throw them back?"
"Well," said the foreman. "You seemed a fine lad to me and I was proud to be able to offer you something to do in order that could learn to earn a wage. Perhaps someday I'll actually have something useful for you to do."
"To hell with this," the boy muttered under his breath and wandered off to find something useful he could do right now, whether it earned him a wage or not.
The moral of the story is: Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all. Sideways.
KFG
I think the problem is that all the "glory"(tenure, respect, etc) belongs to the people who write papers, not the people who review them. Everyone is more interested in getting their name out there rather than reviewing papers. I think we could get some meaningful reform if universities and peers held reviewers with more esteem.
I believe the best solution is to have authors of papers that have
amounted to something important and were rejected by the peer review
processes (not only be siggraph but also other important conferences),
to register somewhere, and basically have the person or persons which
peer-reviewed the paper and then rejected it noted, and to also carry
out an examination of their past rejections and acceptances and attempt
to establish a form of behavior with regards to them.
If said behavior is deemed unacceptable then that person or persons
will very simply not be asked to peer-review papers anymore. Add to that
a question mark will be placed on any future academic contributions they
make.
I would like to see people with the above hanging over their heads try
not to take the time and effort to understand what they are reviewing.
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
I don't know if SIGGRAPH has shrunk or not (I wasn't in graphics in '97), but I wouldn't say that the GDC has taken its place. I sympathize with Ashikhmin's frustration at the conference (but not his reaction), having been on the receiving end of a few cryptic SIGGRAPH rejections.
First of all, I don't agree that it's "mostly a rendering convention now". I'd say there were about 20 papers on rendering and compression out of 80 or 90 papers (unofficial page of papers). I also think that there's lots of "technical action" going on there.
The real problem is that SIGGRAPH hasn't grown with its field. One major conference was fine for the first 20 years or so, but graphics has grown in size and diversity so much in the last 15 years that it's ridiculous that there's still only one "top-shelf" conference. Look at the proceedings for this year's conference; there are papers on rendering, compression, ray-tracing, image processing, vision, data-driven modelling, GPGPU, procedural modelling, HDR, graphics APIs, fluid simulation, photography, mocap, light fields, pcrt, computational geometry, crowd sim, animation, and npr.
EACH of these things that are getting lumped into "GRAPHICS" is enough of a field in its own right that it deserves several journals and conferences of its own.
That's not even the meat of the problem; there ARE conferences for each of these topics, but people generally only submit SIGGRAPH rejects to them! The problem is that everyone wants the prestige that goes with a SIGGRAPH publication, and it's a vicious cycle; there are reviewers who shoot down every paper they feel is a threat to their own work and get away with it, and this forces anyone else who wants to survive there to do the same.
What needs to happen, in my bull-headed opinion, is for all of those people who write good papers that never make it to SIGGRAPH start submitting the first time around to the other conferences - I3D, Pacific Graphics, SCA, IEEE VIS, Eurographics, et cetera. These are all perfectly viable venues that will become as prestigious as people would like, if only people would take them seriously.
I say, let the small-minded dweebs have SIGGRAPH; we shouldn't gauge the quality of our work solely based on SIGGRAPH's rejection policy - even if it were a totally fair process, not every good paper can make it in. Submit your awesome paper to the other conferences, and once these other conferences are packed with impressive work, it'll mean as much as SIGGRAPH.
Just wishful (and a little bitter) thinking.
I don't think "hardware" was the right category for this...
I had a tenured position at a university as well, but I left the system anyway, and it was partly due to issues of the kind described.
Academia hinges almost entirely on your research karma, your success at obtaining grants, and the funds you can bring in to your department. In computing, it has very little to do with how effectively your work extends understanding in your area, even less to do with using honest scientific methods, and absolutely nothing to do with teaching.
And since your research karma is in the hands of the high priests in the field and has relatively little to do with your own technical abilities, I can fully understand the frustrations of other research academics. It's a dead-man's-shoes area, and not a good field to be in unless you're good at cultivating your profile through social engineering.
Fortunately I left early because of the compelling attraction of fat paycheques in freelance contracting, an order of magnitude better than academic payscales. But even without that, I think the social problems within academia might have made me leave in disgust at some point too.
I don't know anything specific to SIGGRAPH, but that kind of malaise is quite widespread in the academic sector.
PS. The current publication/conference-based approach in peer review needs change. The author of TFA actually gave one possible avenue, arXiv, which fits in well with today's greater interest in open systems. I support that.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra