Best Papers from 27 Top-Tier Computer Science Conferences

But the theory community does not place a student's advisor's name on the paper as a matter of course, correct? While in the systems community, the advisors name will usually be on the paper, listed last. With that in mind, the two classifications of "student paper" represent close to the same thing.

There are enough reasonable guides to writing better code (security and otherwise). How would this effort be different? And more importantly, why would Random J. Programmer go there if he didn't go to any of the previous ones?

A good answer for that will cause me to chip in (even though I'm not a fan of the "kickstart everything" craze)

Still, the contrasts between these organizations and Bell Labs are crucial. “This was a company that literally dumped technology on our country,” the physics historian Michael Riordan has said of Bell Labs. “I don’t think we’ll see an organization with that kind of record ever again.” The expectation that, say, Google or Apple could behave like Bell Labs—that such companies could invest heavily in basic or applied research and then sprinkle the results freely around California—seems misplaced, if not naive. Such companies don’t exist as part of a highly regulated national public trust. They exist as part of our international capital markets. They are superb at producing a specific and limited range of technology products.

...

“I’ve often said to my old friends that we were very lucky we got to work there, in an environment that I don’t think will ever exist again,” remarks Dick Frenkiel, who worked on the first generation of cellular technology. “It’s hard to say something will never happen again. But with the monopoly gone, with the whole concept of monopoly essentially discredited, how could there ever be a place like that again?”

...

That perceived natural monopoly wasn’t only justified by the phone system’s technological complexity and interdependence; it was also—in an argument that telephone executives made over and over again—a matter of economics. With one company in effect serving the country’s phone customers, some parts of the phone business that were highly profitable, such as long-distance service, could subsidize other aspects that were less profitable, such as local calling. Profits from high-paying corporate customers, moreover, could subsidize service to residential customers. Profits from dense urban areas could subsidize expansion into sparse rural areas. All in all, this kind of “averaging,” as it was sometimes called, helped make telephone service available and affordable for most Americans.

...

In testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Bill Baker asserted that “the notion that Bell Laboratories could endure and function away from AT&T, Western Electric, and the operating integrated Bell System would be laughable were it not so sinister and so ominous.” It was an argument like the one a gifted child might make in favor of preserving his parents’ marriage.

Having a large amount of marketshare != a monopoly.

Lots of people insist on using the term for both things. I don't know why. But even if you are one of those people, surely you will see there there is a fundamental difference between those two things.

For the sake of this discussion, it would be necessary to differentiate between them.

404 No Such Agency

:)

"In particular, when garbage collection has five times as much memory as required, its runtime performance matches or slightly exceeds that of explicit memory management."

Yep. Like most problems in life, it's 'solved' if you have the money.

Citation rank is one way to evaluate a bunch of papers on a paticular topic, and its definitely one of the best way to find related papers in the first place. However, citations are fairly easy to game (cite yourself, get your colleagues to cite your paper) and therefore are not a great indicator of quality/influence/impact. Next, the venue of the conference is important; an OSDI paper will probably be pretty good given their low acceptance rate. But you can find lots of noise even at the best first-tier venue; its not that hard to get published (in CS) and many rising academics will flood the system with papers to make their tenure case stronger (where the tenure committee is not composed of peers, sheer numbers + conference rank are very important).

Sometimes you'll also find a gem in someone's dissertation 10 years back who didn't really focus on publishing: if you don't pursue an academic career, you don't have too much motivation to publish broadly. Or a good paper that was never cited at all on some topic that was then just emerging or way before its time. The quality of my own papers (as judged personally and subjectively) are inversely related to their citation counts.

My take is that ACM, IEEE and AAAI are all worth maintaining memberships with, especially if you want to stay up to date on what's going on at an academic level. Maybe the biggest advantage of being a member of these orgs, other than access to archived papers, is that subscriptions to their journals is much cheaper if you're a member. YMMV, of course.

On a related note, at least one of IEEE, AAAI or ACM have a discount program for journals published by other outfits, like Springer. Some deal like "join ACM, and your subscription to $FOO from Springer is heavily discounted." If you like to subscribe to journals and what-not, check out all these offers, as they can bring the prices down to where an individual can actually afford them, whereas normally you'd find the price to be so high that only an institution could really justify it.