Comment by drfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

They completely missed, with 1800+ citations, the winner of the “Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2016 Test of Time award”: “Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis” by Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, and Adam Smith. Oh, it also just won the 2017 Gödel Prize; it really ought to be at the top of both the “Theoretical Computer Science” and “Computer Security and Cryptography” lists.

Worse still, with ~3000 citations, Dwork’s “Differential Privacy” (ICALP (2) 2006: 1-12), should rank even higher in the Theoretical Computer Science list. But Google Scholar has completely lost track of that foundational paper; it’s got it all confused with a completely different paper, Dwork’s 2008 “Differential Privacy: A Survey of Results”. Note that this also means that anybody searching for the general topic “differential privacy” on Google Scholar will not get to see the most-cited paper about it! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Disclaimer: Dwork and I have been seen together, for 24 years.

From the article: "This release of classic papers consists of articles that were published in 2006..". Your second one could be there (I haven't looked for it), but you're mentioning some problems with the article, maybe it's that..

They were both published in 2006, so not sure what you're getting at.

Google Scholar and Sean Henderson are promulgating a false historical record, and there seems to be no way to inform them so that they may correct themselves, other than whining here on HN and hoping they notice. Anybody have any other suggestions?

https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general

For the record: Re-confirmed that Google Scholar's "support" page is useless. It simply replies with an email indicating that while you can go ahead and complain, they're not going to bother to do anything to fix their algorithm no matter how wrong-headed it is, so tough luck for you and the rest of the unsuspecting, misinformed, current and future universe. Same result as from the previous 3 tries to correct the record. And same as with recent attempts to contact them via email and even USPS snail-mail.

They don't even seem bothered that this in turn leads to Google's own data-miners publishing false results based on Google Scholar's error-filled data; Sean Henderson and Anurag Acharya both have their names on the erroneous blog entry, and still it remains uncorrected. One might think that they would't want their names associated with false information, and messing up the true historical record.

Anyway, congratulations on being presented with ACM SIGACT's 2017 Gödel Prize "for the invention of Differential Privacy" in the "Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis" paper at last week's ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). Too bad Google Scholar seems intent on hiding it. Maybe all the search-terms I've semi-awkwardly included here will help future (re)searchers find it, as well as Dwork's "Differential Privacy" ICALP 2006.

(Frank?! Congratulations!) Yeah, that's a black hole, at least as of some time ago. But, in your honor, I'll try it again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com