Rambles around computer science

Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time

Fri, 08 Jul 2011

In praise of (good) workshops

Publishing has at least two roles in science. On the one hand, it is a means of disseminating results, concretising the “progress” made by completed work. On the other hand, it is a source of feedback: it's a pillar of the peer review system that rejected papers receive feedback. Meanwhile, the idea behind conferences and workshops is, at least in theory, that each presentation will stimulate discussion and further feedback.

During my PhD I learnt the value of a pattern which seemed to suit my style of work, as follows. When work is under way, write an in-progress style of paper. This gathers early feedback. If it gets accepted (which it usually will, if the idea is good), you also get the benefit of the presentation and the subsequent feedback and discussion. Later, once you have results, write a full research paper to present them. Inevitably, you will have a lot more to say this time round. Some things will have changed, too. You will be able to write a better paper than before, because the earlier paper gave you some idea how to present the work and how to address its perceived weaknesses. (I admit I've only completed this bit of the cycle once so far! There is more in the pipeline....)

When I first went to a conference, I was surprised at how little conferring was going on. Many talks received only a couple of questions. Workshops, on the other hand---at least the good ones---set aside more time for discussion. Smaller audiences at workshops make it more likely that people will initiate discussion as a talk goes along. The lunch and other break times tend to have a more discussion-heavy vibe than those between conference sessions. This is perhaps, again, because a small number encourages more discussion. Also. the workshop group tends to “stick together”, rather than in a conference where people diffuse between sessions. I guess single-track conferences are better in this respect, but I've only been to one of those, and I don't recall a lot of high-quality discussion that time.

(Poster sessions are not bad either, for discussion, if your poster can grab people's attention. But they are painful to present at... never again, I have vowed.)

Recently I had it put to me by an experienced researcher that workshops are not worth bothering with: they're just for people who are starting out, or for less good work, and they stop you from publishing at a better venue. I sympathise because I've been to some bad workshops, and seen some decidedly poor “research” presented at them. But that's an argument for greater workshop participation, not less. Submitting interesting ideas to workshops, for discussion, is exactly what's supposed to happen. The reason that they degenerate into small conferences for mediocre-or-worse work is precisely because they don't get enough good submissions by good people. Some workshops are established, and get good participation, and work very well in that form.

Prior publication at workshops is a subtle thing, but in short, is not something I worry about. I have certainly seen workshops having (online) digital proceedings but from which it's common to see follow-up papers appear later at conferences. I'm not sure whether this is because workshop papers, being more preliminary presentations of work, simply “don't count” (an opinion I've heard voiced) or because those follow-up papers present quite a large delta. For the kind of work I do, a big delta is not hard to achieve anyhow---the contributions of the workshop paper would mostly be in argument, “position” or “idea”, together with perhaps some motivating experiments and preliminary results. Implementation and ensuing experimental work is saved for a full paper. Archival is cheap nowadays, so the convenience of having a printed proceedings accessible from the same place where we can find all the other papers shouldn't be seen as giving equal contribution-weight to these papers. (Suggesting otherwise seems to me to be endorsing a “numbers game” approach to the evaluation of research. Heaven forbid that we actually decide for ourselves what the contribution of some paper is, by reading it.)

I can see this split being less applicable for more theoretical work. The more abstract the formulation of the problem, the less there is to argue about. For practical work, discussing the problem set-up and high-level approach is very valuable. Even when work seeks to build big systems, the idea behind some work is often much bigger than the part that you are actually able to implement in practice. It's nice to have an opportunity for the bigger ideas to be discussed, reviewed and recognised.

A final reason for me to enthuse about workshops is that I'm one of the “little guys”. So far I've worked only on my own. I don't have big collaborative projects whose conference papers I can parachute onto. And I don't have very many coworkers who I can discuss my ideas in detail with. Workshops are a support infrastructure that I particularly need---for feedback, and also, perhaps slightly cynically, to maximise the exposure my work gets. Ultimately I want to convince people that my research vision is worth investing in. It's important that I take up opportunities for conveying my potential---which I believe to be great!---as well as what I've achieved, which will never match up to those who are habitual collaborators. Of course I'm not opposed to collaborating---far from it, but I just can't seem to find the right person....

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