Month: November 2017
The Expertise, Ignorance, and Personal Failings of the Program Committee (and Other Readers)
A research paper's task is to convey the insights of your work to your audience -- first the reviewers and then your research community. To get published, your paper must satisfy the program committee. Once published, it has to hold the interest of other researchers and engineers. If it fails at either of these tasks, it will not have the impact it should.
Engineering Reliable Persistence @ ACM SIGARCH Blog
Integrating non-volatile main memories (NVMMs) into the storage/memory hierarchy make data integrity a critical design consideration. Protecting data in NVMM is a complex problem: media errors and software bugs can corrupt data and the reliability of each memory cell degrades as it is used, potentially leading to premature failure. Hardware and software both have a role to play, but trying to solve problems in the wrong place can needlessly complicate the system, leave the system open to data corruption, and/or sacrifice performance.Read more
How the Sausage is Made
Until you've served on a program committee, the review process may seem opaque and mysterious. PC members generally try to do a good, impartial job of selecting papers, but PC's are human institutions, humans are flawed, so PC's are imperfect. Understanding the PC process can make the results less confusing, and provide useful guidance for crafting papers.
"Make it so, Number One."
You've done it! You have played the key role in a compelling piece of research. You are the first author. You get the glory, but you also have a lot of work to do.