Some time ago, 2 of my PhD students were facing the prospect of going away to do their research elsewhere for a few months. In both cases, and for different reasons, it made a lot of sense for them to go. But we needed to stay in touch, and I needed to keep tabs on what they were doing. These days, with tools like Skype and Google docs, collaborating over the Internet is really easy. However, neither Skype nor Google docs are designed for supporting the specific kinds of interactions that go on between advisor and student, and within small academic units (aka “Labs”). First, we need to run them both independently. Second, and more importantly, we can’t really share a PDF or powerpoint document in the way that we do when we are working face to face going through a paper or a presentation — pointing, highlighting, using words like “here”, “this paragraph”, “this picture”, “go to next page”, etc. So I built my own virtual lab.
Conferences vs. Journals: The Hidden Assumptions
Some conversations I’ve been having over the past year led me to a deeper exploration of the issue of conferences vs. journals in Computer Science. The debate, so far, seems to be missing a few critical observations regarding scientific journals and our own ACM, and therefore it is somewhat incomplete. This essay lays out my thoughts on it.
Warning: No one except academics cares about this!
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