Notes: journals, conferences and cie
03 Nov 2021It has been a while since the last set of “monthly” notes on this blog. Here is a set of notes about scientific life without science: new journals, conference and collaboration experiments, and sociology of research.
Two new open-access journals
Two new (full/diamond/golden) open access journals are being launched!
TheoretiCS is a new top journal for theoretical computer science. Its advisory board consists of one representative for each of the main TCS conferences (including Jennifer Welch for PODC). I guess it is meant to compete with JACM and JComp in terms of prestige, while focusing on TCS. It is an overlay journal, which means that the published papers are basically stored on the arxiv, with a stamp of approval of the journal. It is published by the (non-profit) TheoretiCS foundation and hosted by the episciences platform. (TheoretiCS has not been officially launched yet, thus does not accept submissions at the moment.)
Computing in geometry and topology is another new journal, whose scope is computational geometry and topology in a broad sense. CGT will publish both standard papers and surveys, and it already accepts submissions. From what I understood, geometry already has one open-access journal, Journal of Computational Geometry, but it is only for the very best papers in the field, and I guess the new journal will also publish papers that are “just great”.
A blog track at ICLR
The AI conference ICLR has a new track for blog posts. The call for paper has some loose guidelines, but basically anything that is usually considered to be a blog post is appropriate (within the scope of ICLR). One does not need to have a blog to participate: it can be just one post, that will appear on the conference blog.
Blog posts seem very important in AI, because of the noisy reviewing process, and the huge number of papers written each year. But because blog posts are not rewarded enough, there is little incentive to work on them. This track is meant to mitigate this effect. See the presentation of the new track for more insights and motivations.
Blogs are probably more popular in AI than in TCS, so maybe it wouldn’t work in TCS, but maybe at some point it would be worth trying to have such a track.
A simplicity track at ESA
A few years back, a new satellite conference for SODA was established, SOSA, focusing on simplicity in algorithms. It seems that it was a success, because now the European sister of SODA, ESA, is creating a new track with the same focus on simplicity.
I’ve never submitted a paper to SOSA, but I really like the idea, and I think that simplicity is indeed something that we need should be highlighted and rewarded.
Mathematics morality
Thanks to the 11011110 blog, I discovered Mathematics, morally, an essay by Eugenia Cheng. It is about all these situations where people working in maths/CS say things like “it is morally true”, “morally, what happens is” etc. I actually avoid saying this, because I’ve heard people being very angry about it (“Do you know what is morality!?”). But Cheng has a very nice explanation of what it means, and why it is relevant to use it. She also writes about the hiatus there is between mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics. The essay is 20+ pages, but I really recommend it.
Supercollaboration
Supercollaboration is a way of doing research popularized by Erik Demaine and his colleagues. Basically, they wrote soft rules that formalize what is happening in workshops that are really “workshops” and not “listenshops”. The format is: a small crowd gather in some place, present open problems, people work on these problems. In case they solve problems, each participant decide whether (s)he considers her/himself an author or not, and until a possible publication all the discussions are confidential (ie communication outside the group can only happen if the group agrees).
I’ve experimented such events several times this year, and really enjoyed it. It was within the graph theory community where it seems to be more common than in mainstream TCS.
The people promoting supercollaboration wrote a very interesting and concrete “How to”, explaining how to organized and drive such collaborations. See here.
Mistakes in papers
It has been on the Internet for a while already, but I haven’t blogged about it yet. Thomas Vidick wrote a blog post about a major mistake in one of his papers, detailing the scientific, personal, and social aspects of it. A very useful and interesting read.