1 / 4

Properly Incenting Academia (or, how to resist quitting my day job)

Properly Incenting Academia (or, how to resist quitting my day job). Mike Carey (UC Irvine) Beckman DB Self-Assessment Meeting October 2013. Our Field Has Contracted Metricitis. Then: What really cool things can I study and build? How (and when) should I disseminate my results?

varick
Download Presentation

Properly Incenting Academia (or, how to resist quitting my day job)

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Properly Incenting Academia(or, how to resist quitting my day job) Mike Carey (UC Irvine) Beckman DB Self-Assessment Meeting October 2013

  2. Our Field Has Contracted Metricitis • Then: • What really cool things can I study and build? • How (and when) should I disseminate my results? • How useful does unit of work W seem to be? • What has been the overall impact of X’s work? • Now: • What can I write a paper on? • What (smallest piece of) work will be required? • How different does unit of work W seem to be? • What is X’s (i) paper count or (ii) H-index?

  3. Let’s Look at a Case Study:XML Query Processing • I did some “XML time” in industry (1999-2008) • BEA offered XML-based data integration • Being “ex-research”, my team looked around for useful ideas to borrow and to implement • Lore (Jennifer et al), TIMBER (Jag et al) were very helpful (e.g., query algebras and approaches) • But not so much for the other 1000+ papers on QP inside the world’s biggest single XML document…  (Apologies to anyone I’ve just offended with this caricature of the angle bracket situation … but ….)

  4. Unfortunate Consequences • This has (badly) warped the academic culture • We no longer seem to evaluate impact ourselves • Instead, we count survivors of a reviewing process that many whine about as itself being random & broken (?!?) • We value quantity and (gratuitous) differences over quality or real potential usefulness • Other sciences value refinement and step-wise progress • But we would seem to prefer to keep making new stuff up • This also affects our product (student) pipeline • Impacts what agencies like NSF will fund • Impacts how students think about their primary goal • Discourages doing things that actually take some time • One aspect of which is making sure something is really feasible • Which seems especially dangerous in a smoke-and-mirrors discipline • Hopefully our case of Metricitis is not yet in Stage 4 ….

More Related