[HN Gopher] The tech industry controls CS conference funding. Wh...
___________________________________________________________________
The tech industry controls CS conference funding. What are the
dangers?
Author : imartin2k
Score : 126 points
Date : 2022-03-12 07:41 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (freedom-to-tinker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (freedom-to-tinker.com)
| srvmshr wrote:
| The basic premise that the author is expounding is "CS research
| will be guided by industry interests". This is good to most
| extent, save a few very remote situations. Conference funding in
| particular has a very tenuos relationship to what directions get
| a nod of approval in overall CS research.
|
| CS (and EE) is a field which has seen great advances and
| adoptions due to the tighter integration between industry and
| academia. The tech has advanced much due to the fact that
| researchers manage to work on hard & real problems. Many of the
| avenues of research emerge & advance from industry adoption -
| e.g. bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems,
| crytocurrency etc.
|
| In my observation, whenever there has been a significant push by
| a single corporate entity, it has seen a palpable pushback. One
| example that comes to my mind is Amazon engineering vs. Rust
| foundation. Also, if any company tries to cut some major
| research's lifeline, there is always a competition grabbing that
| opportunity to secure it to its own future advantages. There are
| no shortages of 500-pound gorillas when it comes to corporate
| sponsorship. Everyone wants a piece of the cake.
|
| As mentioned, the only time this could suffer is when a company
| of the size of Google, AWS establishes complete monopoly on that
| research & ultimately sends to some academic graveyard, much to
| everyone's horror. But in my limited knowledge, that kind of
| black swan event doesn't seem to have ever happened.
|
| Corporate sponsorship aren't inherently evil. University
| researchers get a taste of real world tech issues & companies
| advance their tech by sponsorship. Conferences also become a good
| hiring venue for jobs or internship. It's a win-win from what I
| see. Conference sponsorship is in no way going to change the fate
| of ongoing research.
| cjfd wrote:
| You are saying that the risks of industry interests have not
| come true. There has been much talk about companies trying to
| influence what products are being used in education, which for
| universities, is closely related to research. Even if we assume
| this to be true a risk that has not happened (much) is by no
| means guaranteed to not happen in the near future.
|
| Also the examples that you name "bandwidth compression, codecs,
| recommender systems, crytocurrency" are really quite sexy. They
| sound like things academics would research all on their own
| without corporate involvement. The thing is that basically
| these things can be researched if one just has a computer, or
| in the case of bandwidth compression, a few computers, and
| enormous amounts of money are not really necessary so the
| corporate involvement would not seem to be strictly necessary.
| And then, when a corporation is involved one runs the risk of
| the findings disappearing behind a copyright or a patent wall.
| It is much better for all of us if they become available to
| everybody. That is, by the way, one of the reasons to have
| academia in the first place.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| > And then, when a corporation is involved one runs the risk
| of the findings disappearing behind a copyright or a patent
| wall.
|
| True, but universities often patent algorithmic (and other)
| discoveries and try to charge companies for implementing them
| as well.
| srvmshr wrote:
| > There has been much talk about companies trying to
| influence what products are being used in education, which
| for universities, is closely related to research.
|
| I will speak for ML & Systems. I am not an expert on all
| domains. Most tools that researchers use in ML are open-
| sourced e.g. Pytorch TF Keras etc. Foundational papers like
| GFS, BigTable, Hadoop etc are publicly available now. There
| is a moratorium on how soon it appears, but it isn't behind
| walls forever. Academia tends to choose more open source over
| closed source. I'd have argued MATLAB to be more successful
| than Python in that case. It is not. In industry the practice
| may be more of 50-50 or even more towards closed source.
|
| > They sound like things academics would research all on
| their own without corporate involvement. The thing is that
| basically these things can be researched if one just has a
| computer.
|
| How can you emulate operation involving scale with just a
| computer or a bunch of computers. Hence, that is where
| industrial efforts come in play. A lot of things work well
| for a dozen, and then a completely different problem emerges
| when we talk about hundreds or thousands of users.
|
| I am only alluding to the fact that CS, in contrast to many
| other disciplines, has a more symbiotic relationship with
| industry. Companies do have incentives of using copyright &
| trade secrets, but there is enough trickle-down effect that
| gives academia to pursue newer challenges. The cycle repeats
| over and over. Academia cannot replace industry and likewise.
| If there is any pressing problem of this symbiosis, it is
| more of labor attrition. More people are leaving academia for
| better pay. But that is not what the topic was about.
| rapnie wrote:
| I don't know about CS conferences but I've heard people
| complaining about free software conferences with a lot of Big
| Tech sponsoring where speakers were kindly requested by
| conference organizers not to talk too much about subjects "that
| may upset the sponsor" and things like that. If there's that
| kind of forces at play, then it is quite detrimental to
| receiving objective information.
| naoqj wrote:
| What kind of a subject can upset a sponsor in a CS
| conference?
| srvmshr wrote:
| I have attended a few PyCon, and fleetingly visited/watched
| several similar conferences. There seems to be enough
| instances where presenters have pressed companies like FAGMA
| to correct certain implementations in their product stack.
| Even CPP conference has on several times called out MS VC++
| on their compiler peculiarities in the distant past. Whitehat
| security conferences are usually full blown on the offensive
| in showing how compromised some platforms could be. I am not
| discounting your concern, but unless evidence exists, this
| could be more hearsay or anecdotal.
|
| (I dont work for any of these companies and on several
| occasions declined to interview. Full disclosure: no
| relationship).
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| It's hard to provide evidence for this type of thing, but
| it's very much a concern to be believed. Companies giving
| you a corporate sponsorship will definitely influence your
| decision making. Always. Choices are made, often literally
| behind the curtain, to appease them. Seeing a few public
| examples of push back doesn't eliminate this fact.
|
| (Full disclosure: I am an indie conference maker [0], so
| I'm biased against corporate sponsors.)
|
| [0] https://handmade-seattle.com
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure that a conference stage is typically
| the most appropriate place to go after companies for
| specific issues. I can think of one of two examples where
| (to me) it was called for. But I certainly wouldn't want it
| to be the norm.
|
| ADDED: What I mean by this is that a conference filled with
| talks where people are badmouthing competitors or others
| sounds pretty unpleasant.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Whitehat security conferences are usually full blown on
| the offensive in showing how compromised some platforms
| could be.
|
| Until recently it was common for sponsor companies to
| threaten conferences to pull talks that demonstrated
| security flaws in their products. They've realized that the
| PR hit from this usually outweighs any "benefits" now but
| it used to be a whole thing.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > "CS research will be guided by industry interests". This is
| good to most extent, save a few very remote situations.
|
| You start out with a pretty strong statement there...
|
| The point (for me) is not so much that a single company might
| try to push through some evil villainous plan. It's that _all_
| the companies that tend to sponsor such conferences (or more
| generally "guide" the research) have specific incentives.
|
| Take as the most glaring example the way that machine learning
| and statistics have been developing over the last years. The
| industry has an interest in collecting and knowing as much
| about their customers as possible. Most prominently, facebook
| and google are both pretty openly based on surveilling every
| detail of their users' (and everyone else's) lives.
|
| ML _research_ has been co-developing with this. The big money
| (grants, hardware support, PhD funding, conferences, ...) has
| been overwhelmingly in domains that directly benefit these
| players. A lot of "cutting edge" research at the moment is of
| little benefit to anyone who is _not_ a surveillance capitalist
| megacorp, simply because of the compute & datasets needed to
| power these methods. "Causality" has been a big topic over the
| last years. And yes, it will benefit a lot of things. But where
| does the actual research start? With the question "why did the
| user click that search page ad, and what ad should we show them
| next?"
|
| Sure, there is _a little_ research into privacy preserving ML,
| into "small data" ML, into federated learning (i.e. user-
| centric ML, not "distributed training" as in spreading
| computation over a big corp's cluster) and you can always argue
| "yeah but in a few years this will be commodity."
|
| That sounds like trickle down ML research to me. I'm not
| convinced. But you'd kinda have to make that case, because
| otherwise "this is good to most extent" doesn't seem so
| believable. One big aspect of what industry-guided research has
| given people is all the burn-out, anxiety, sense of loss of
| agency, UI dark patterns, polarization, and dumbing down of the
| internet. Along some huge upsides, yes, but I wouldn't call
| that these are "a few very remote situations".
| srvmshr wrote:
| You have several fair points. The overall direction of course
| gets some incentives from industry. But there are government
| sponsorships & private fellowship too. ELLIS, DARPA, NSF, NIH
| invest several billion dollars each year to R1, CAREER, MRI,
| SURF programs which takes care of fledgling topics until they
| see more adoption. Simons Foundation e.g. similarly hosts
| several hundred researchers to work on CS theory.
|
| Also Google and AWS in particular have put in a lot of money
| on ML/RL based solutions - on reducing electricity grid
| loads, Alphafold protein & drug discovery, neuroscience,
| precision agriculture, personalized education & even
| interplanetary science/astronomy. You could argue these could
| be glamorized CSR programs. But in net effects, they are
| advancing our understanding in several discipline which do
| not directly feed their bottomlines.
|
| (Full disclosure again: I am not affiliated to any FAGMA or
| benefitted from any of these grants)
| bigcat123 wrote:
| kkfx wrote:
| Seeing modern tech {e,in}volution, all on big of IT interests
| and almost zero for users and other not-so-big companies
| interests... I disagree.
|
| Actual tech came from the big lab era starting from Xerox PARC,
| since them no real evolution was made, just improvements and
| new way to make people bound instead of being empowered by IT,
| IMVHO that's means just a thing: private-company made IT
| evolution is _harmful for the society_ and then _must be
| erased_ so badly that no one in the future will even think for
| an instance to try re-proposing it.
|
| The solution IMO does not goes much through conferences but
| through universities that must be publicly founded, and ONLY
| founded by the public no to research "for business" but "for
| society", not to form "workers of the future" but "citizens of
| the future", doing so left a healthy business world and a
| healthy society.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I don't really have any insights to provide on "big companies are
| using sponsorships to whitewash their impact on society" but
| something I've seen is presentations and research often done in
| the context of the company's unique circumstances that are not
| necessarily broadly applicable. It's only natural of course that
| a company will optimize their research into things that are
| relevant to them but when you're listening to them you need to
| keep "what is the context that this was written in" in the back
| of your mind at all times.
|
| For example, if you ever attend a C++ talk by Googlers, you'll
| notice that they basically only talk about C++ as they use it,
| silently ignoring things they don't care about. By virtue of
| google3 and their style guide, things like ABI compatibility are
| of very little consequence to them, and they can take away
| expensive-to-support APIs and present about how they "optimized"
| some part of the STL, or how support for exceptions is something
| they'll look into later or (when they're feeling uncharitable)
| bad actually(tm). Similarly most talks about Linux networking are
| driven by e.g. Facebook, who seem to slowly just be converging on
| running their entire stack using eBPF in the kernel. Apple
| presents their ML research about on-device learning and somewhere
| in the middle they'll be like "oh also we have specialized
| silicon to do this efficiently otherwise it isn't practical".
| Microsoft will present virtualization research and you'll find
| that their threat model is trying to prevent people from
| jailbreaking the Xbox.
|
| I'm not trying to say this research is bad or not useful, but
| it's important to put them in the context of where they're coming
| from or who they're being funded by, because the entire thing-
| from the premise, to the execution, all the way to the
| conclusion-is going to be dependent on the circumstances the
| research was done in, and often it'll be presented as a general
| result when it really only make sense in the context of that
| particular company's needs. If you're being cynical, it's a way
| to appear open and exercise soft power through mindshare, but for
| most cases I think the alternative (no research) is probably
| worse so I'm not generally concerned.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I sort of agree with whatever you just said. Perspective is
| very important as solutions emerge from the problems in play
| for these companies. I will probably extend this a bit further
| : these solutions also increase our understanding and mental
| models for better & secure products. What company X does is not
| only limited to X, but benefits others too.
|
| For corporate sway in research - its my personal opinion (any
| only limited to me), that citizen awareness is generally high.
| HN and similar communities are quick to spot gaping holes or
| flaws, and alternatives are plenty as well. There is
| fortunately a still healthy ecosystem of indie developers who
| contribute everything from Linux kernel to iOS patches. As you
| mention, as of present this does not seem a big concern and the
| alternative scenario (no academia-industry symbiosis) could be
| worse.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yeah, I definitely don't want to come across as asking for
| companies to stop publishing their research. The information
| is always interesting to see, and sometimes even trying to
| sus out the bias can help you better understand the companies
| themselves. Like, picking the example of C++, you can tell
| that Microsoft cares about ABI stability because they ship an
| OS that exposes APIs to binaries (Apple cares as well, but
| they're far less vocal about C++, but in the language they
| own-Swift-they've gone all the way to reifying an entire ABI
| stable interface for generics). The problem is when e.g.
| Google presents something about not caring about ABI
| stability, and whether unintentionally or not, recruits
| people to their cause, to the extent that I see Windows
| programmers who ship closed source software clamoring for
| Microsoft to "stop preventing C++ from being more efficient
| and better" because they read a bunch of stuff about how
| std::string could get a better layout or something. This
| definitely isn't _wrong_ but the perspective is easily skewed
| by what your goals are, and it 's easy to accidentally think
| Google's goals are the same as yours because they certainly
| have no incentive to suggest otherwise.
|
| The question of how much we actually avoid this is a
| complicated one to answer. I like to think that a lot of the
| obvious biases get caught, but I have also been around long
| enough to know that Hacker News is definitely not immune to
| this. My employer constantly falls into the trap of having a
| problem and then looking around to see how FAANG is solving
| it, then trying that solution largely uncritically, despite
| not quite being a FAANG. It's mildly amusing when your see a
| principal engineer with several times more experience (and
| compensation!) than you do get tripped up by it, but it only
| emphasizes that evaluating research with a critical eye is
| difficult to do and everyone struggles with it to some
| extent.
| srvmshr wrote:
| > when your see a principal engineer with several times
| more experience (and compensation!) than you do get tripped
| up by it.
|
| Slightly off topic :) I feel by the time people become
| Principals, they lose the laser sharp focus because they
| are juggling too many things at the same time. Principals
| who work as IC on the team, however are much better since
| they are hands-on to the current problems.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Forget custom ML silicon, Apple also have custom Arm
| _instructions_ that as far as I 'm aware they still don't think
| we're of the sort to have earned the right to know about
| (officially).
| saagarjha wrote:
| Apple happens to be very quiet about GXF in their platform
| security guide, yes ;)
| onion2k wrote:
| That's something that ARM explicitly use as a selling point
| to attract people to license their designs.
|
| https://www.arm.com/technologies/custom-instructions
| mhh__ wrote:
| Apple have a FU licence, it's not that kind of arrangement.
| pkaye wrote:
| Apple has an architectural license that allows them to
| build ARM-compatible processors with custom micro-
| architecture. I'm sure others like Google and Nvidia also
| have it.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| > For example, if you ever attend a C++ talk by Googlers,
| you'll notice that they basically only talk about C++ as they
| use it, silently ignoring things they don't care about.
|
| Not all Googler talks.
|
| My talks at CppCon (Polymorphism != Virtual
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxo85L2lC0, Beyond Struct:
| Metaprogramming a Struct Replacement
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FXfrojjIo80) had nothing to do
| with Google3 and use techniques that would likely be
| discouraged by the style guide (especially the struct one).
| tialaramex wrote:
| > For example, if you ever attend a C++ talk by Googlers ...
| present about how they "optimized" some part of the STL
|
| I'm guessing you're thinking about things like Swiss Tables.
| But the situation isn't that Swiss Tables "optimize" the STL's
| containers instead they're just the replacement you'd actually
| want. You can't "optimize" the STL containers, because they're
| defined in a way that's hostile to optimization.
|
| Take std::unordered_set. Why is it so _slow_ ? Well, your
| standard library is obliged to make this work roughly the same
| way as it would have when explained in a CS introductory Data
| Structures class in the 1980s. This is not necessary for the
| ordinary understanding or use of an "unordered set" which is
| why Swiss Tables has one that's much better, but if you've paid
| attention in that class you know there are buckets of keys with
| similar hash values so that's what the STL is obliged to
| provide.
|
| If you just want an "unordered set" you do not want
| std::unordered_set despite the name, you want the much better
| replacements from Swiss Tables or various other offerings and
| it's unfortunate that std::unordered_set is in the standard and
| those are not.
|
| Of course the other reason std::unordered_set is so slow for
| you isn't solved by Swiss Tables, but it was called out by the
| Googlers presenting Swiss Tables more than once. _Your hash
| function is garbage_. Even if you insist on using
| std::unordered_set because it was good enough thirty years ago
| or whatever, this part of the lesson is invaluable anyway.
|
| When using data structures that are faster because of hashing,
| you defeat them by using poor quality hashes. To a first
| approximation if you aren't _sure_ that you are using a good
| quality hash then you probably aren 't. In any optimisation
| quest start by measuring, and in this case that means
| measuring: Is your hash actually any good at... hashing ?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| To further support your point, the engineers at Facebook who
| worked on the F14 hashmaps/hashsets saw the same issues, and
| created two implementations as a result:
|
| "Folly has chosen to expose a fast C++ class without
| reference stability as well as a slower C++ class that
| allocates each entry in a separate node. The node-based
| version is not fully standard compliant, but it is drop-in
| compatible with the standard version in all the real code
| we've seen."
|
| https://engineering.fb.com/2019/04/25/developer-tools/f14/
| saagarjha wrote:
| This is basically my point, though. The things you've said
| (which are basically just what Google pushes) are correct.
| For their use case, they've found some good wins and there's
| lots of interesting things under the hood enabling this.
| That's cool, but these improvements come at a cost: the ABI
| (and in some cases, the API) is different. For Google this is
| OK because they can just ask their clients to adapt. This
| might be fine for you as well. But it's definitely not the
| case for everyone, and ignoring it (at best) or actively
| harping on the standard for making concessions for the "dumb"
| reason of stability is not appropriate.
| unglaublich wrote:
| I think this is a good, relevant read:
|
| The Death of Corporate Research Labs
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764
| ComradePhil wrote:
| If you think that is bad, you must be horrified by how the drug
| industry operates.
| js8 wrote:
| Or the oil industry - American Geological Union was one of the
| last scientific institutions to accept the reality of
| anthropogenic global warming.
| teddyh wrote:
| That's not really surprising; they simply operate on geologic
| time.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| Probably because it is not as big an issue as the CleanTech
| industry PR wanted people to believe?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| This article bases a large portion of its incentive for being
| written on the claim that "84% percent of CS professors receive
| at least some industry funding". To do this it cites a paper
| which, as far as I can tell, says no such thing. There are three
| problems with the claim and I think they ruin the rest of the
| article.
|
| First, the original paper only looked at UT, MIT, Stanford, and
| Berkeley. But a fair bit of industry funding is an exercise in
| prestige sharing: "I'm funding a professor at MIT". As a result,
| in my experience the top universities receive the lion's share of
| tech industry funding, and this very severely biases this claim.
|
| Second, the paper compiled faculty who _ever received_ funding
| over the course of their career, no matter how small: but the
| article doesn 't say "received": it says "receive". That is a
| huge difference. Looking back on my own career, I guess I'm in
| the list: once a VP of a local company chipped in maybe $15K to
| help my advisor fund me for my last PhD year simply because he
| was excited by the research work; and I think once Google funded
| some undergraduate students of mine working on RoboCup. I realize
| some faculty are funded more by industry: but I think my
| situation is typical.
|
| Third, because it is often meant for prestige rather than quid
| pro quo, and because Google and friends don't like paying
| overhead/indirect, the actual size of funding from industry tends
| to be very small and in the form of gifts. Not always, but
| usually. While Google might pay something like $30K to run a new
| program for Diversity in CS, DARPA is awarding a grant for $1.5
| million to build a new multirobot architecture. The total
| industry funding of computer science, as a proportion of total
| funding, is probably somewhere south of 5%. I'd guess AI is about
| the same, but let's say 10% to be generous. See the following NSF
| graph. https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-
| assets/d41586-019-01...
|
| So what are we left with? I don't think the article can claim
| that industry is of any significant consequence in CS academic
| funding. At most we could say that the industry may have funded
| faculty over the course of their careers, in some context, often
| minor and with a bias towards prestige universities. That seems
| to be a pretty weak hook to hang one's hat on.
| aaron695 wrote:
| geoalchimista wrote:
| The worse thing is to let academia control conference funding.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Related (no affiliation): http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13676
|
| Abstact:
|
| > As governmental bodies rely on academics' expert advice to
| shape policy regarding Artificial Intelligence, it is important
| that these academics not have conflicts of interests that may
| cloud or bias their judgement. Our work explores how Big Tech can
| actively distort the academic landscape to suit its needs. By
| comparing the well-studied actions of another industry (Big
| Tobacco) to the current actions of Big Tech we see similar
| strategies employed by both industries. These strategies enable
| either industry to sway and influence academic and public
| discourse. We examine the funding of academic research as a tool
| used by Big Tech to put forward a socially responsible public
| image, influence events hosted by and decisions made by funded
| universities, influence the research questions and plans of
| individual scientists, and discover receptive academics who can
| be leveraged. We demonstrate how Big Tech can affect academia
| from the institutional level down to individual researchers.
| Thus, we believe that it is vital, particularly for universities
| and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the
| appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big
| Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Is the capitalization "Big Tech" widely used or is it a
| shibboleth? I would guess that I can anticipate the tone of the
| paper based on that - I'm curious if that holds up.
|
| (Of course, mentioning "Big Tobacco" does give its own hint.)
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| This argument suggests that by sponsoring conferences, companies
| can shape their content. That may be true for big commercial
| exhibitions, but I don't see how it works for academic meetings.
| For those meetings, the financial backing is confirmed years in
| advance, while the actual program is set six months or so before
| the event. And at CS like conferences, the content is determined
| by independent reviewers. So I can imagine that corporate
| sponsors might shape content by stopping support of conferences
| with low quality papers, but otherwise they have essentially no
| role in what is presented, other than providing some high profile
| keynote speakers that might increase conference visibility.
| eslaught wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing. I've been on multiple
| program committees for multiple conferences and it would be
| laughable to claim sponsors have any influence over what gets
| published at a conference.
|
| Sponsors have much more direct (and visible) influence over,
| you know, sponsorship of the research itself. But even there,
| corporate sponsorship is only one slice (and a relatively small
| one) of overall CS funding. There are plenty of government or
| independent sponsors who would be happy to fund research that
| is contrary to big corporate interests.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. It's truer of non-academic conferences which often even
| have sponsor slots. But even there, there's at least some
| effort not to have product pitches because if they tilt too far
| in that direction, people just won't attend. Conferences need
| to maintain some base level of quality/utility or they fade
| away.
| reissbaker wrote:
| The article seems like it's conflating philosophy/social science
| analysis of the impact of technology with academic computer
| science. Would papers on "the social justice impact of the atom
| bomb" be reasonable physics conference topics? I... really don't
| think so. That's social science. I'm not saying it shouldn't be
| talked about, but it seems pretty weird to complain that hard
| science conferences don't have a lot of social science topics,
| and then blame that on capitalism. Academic computer scientists
| or physicists aren't even likely the best people to be
| researching that! I don't think the physicists in the USSR were
| primary attendees of social science or philosophy conferences
| either.
|
| Aside from that -- and I suppose this part _is_ capitalism 's
| fault -- where do they propose the money come from, if not the
| industry benefitting the most from the research? Big Tech has a
| lot of money, so conferences and research they sponsor gets a lot
| of funding. Banning tech companies, or restricting them, from
| funding research doesn't magically make other research get
| funded. If there was anywhere close to the ability to get funding
| from other sources, the article wouldn't exist. But that's where
| the money is now, and absent some societal upheaval and replacing
| capitalism with... ?... that's where you can get the money from.
|
| Yes yes government research projects, but realistically those
| were all DARPA projects, and having the military be the primary
| funding source for research isn't exactly getting rid of
| conflicts of interest when it comes to determining social impact
| of said research.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Go to smaller independent conferences and make sure they're
| organised along ecological and ethically sound lines.
|
| First you'll have a better experience. Since the pandemic I
| haven't been on any academic jollies, but for years I've had a
| personal policy not to go to large conferences. They are too
| hectic. Everything is rushed and talks are squeezed. They value
| form over function and slick presentation uber alles. No time for
| slow conversation, precarious demos, mooching and mingling.
|
| There are two kinds of conferences, the ones where people go to
| actually confer, and massive industry extravaganzas that are
| indistinguishable from trade shows. A friend who is a medical
| doctor once told me of a endocrine conference she attended, 5000
| miles away in Africa, with 10,000 attendees that ran for 12 days.
| She said it left her drained, bewildered and overwhelmed.
|
| People don't attend conferences like that to learn anything, they
| go to be seen, as a footnote in the proceedings, so they can put
| it on their CV.
|
| As a seasoned, senior academic secure in myself and my work I
| don't need to chalk up creds like fresh post-docs, but my advice
| to anyone is don't be cowed into thinking big impersonal
| conferences are "prestigious". Really no one cares. Pick a small
| gathering, somewhere nice (by a beach, forest or mountain venue),
| not too distant, where you can mingle and make acquaintances that
| will last for life.
|
| Truth is, many of the most _influential_ "conferences" are really
| cliquey gatherings where you will meet the "right" people.
|
| So get involved in the conference organisation. See who you can
| invite. That reduces costs, and it gives you some rights/leverage
| to say what you feel, and to understand the network in your
| field.
|
| If you object to Big Tech being sponsors say so - conference
| organisers need _people_ as much as they need funding.
|
| If you must attend a giant extravaganza, and you seriously,
| credibly object to funding by big tech, say so in your
| presentation. There is little or no comeback from politely
| dissing unethical big corps in your talk - in fact in some places
| it's de rigueur. Your disapproval ends up in the proceedings
| online etc, and that's not something company PR likes. Next year
| they won't offer mission accomplished.
|
| As an academic you have a platform, and rights to speak your
| mind, so use it. Ethics is a very important part of research and
| you are not restricted in speaking about it. Best of all, start
| hosting your own small conferences. It's a great learning
| experience. Many great conferences are hosted on a shoestring.
| rhaksw wrote:
| I completely agree with the concern over CS research being too
| heavily influenced by industry. An area I feel is underresearched
| is social media moderation, especially in the more open systems
| like reddit where anyone can moderate.
|
| There has been no research that I've found that looks at the
| impact of Reddit's style of _comment_ moderation: by default,
| authors are not notified of removals _and_ the content is
| presented to them as if it 's still live [1]. You can try and see
| it yourself here [2].
|
| Some people in-the-know may brush off this behavior, assuming it
| wards off bad actors. However, bad actors have access to the same
| tool. The question is, what is the result of that?
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/E3bFvKh.png
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Research on Reddit moderation seems more like it may belong in
| sociology or psychology than CS to be fair.
| [deleted]
| rhaksw wrote:
| That would be amazing if those fields would dive in but I
| don't think that's happened yet. Such researchers would need
| to pair with a coder. FWIW, this is the result of a google
| scholar search for "reddit moderation":
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=redd.
| ..
| lolinder wrote:
| > Such researchers would need to pair with a coder.
|
| To set up the code for the experiment, maybe, but that
| could be done by even a second-year CS student. A CS
| researcher wouldn't be needed at all to do this research.
| It's strictly a social science question.
| rhaksw wrote:
| I completely agree. Nonetheless, the research I've seen
| up to now has come from computing labs, and I was
| speculating that access or familiarity with the data may
| contribute to that.
| srvmshr wrote:
| Just curious: What is the relationship between Reddit
| moderation and conference funding. I seem to have missed your
| point. Could you please elaborate further?
| rhaksw wrote:
| The article suggests conference funding influences what gets
| researched, which is the wider concern. The link is between
| conference funding and research. Reddit moderation is an
| example of something I feel is underresearched.
|
| Thanks for your question, I edited my original comment to
| hopefully be more clear on this.
| srvmshr wrote:
| There are enough significant impact conferences like FOCS
| or the TCS+ symposium, which have no/minimal corporate
| funding. In the initial years, even ICLR didn't have
| corporate sponsorship. That actually does not stop people
| from probing pressing issues.
|
| Reddit censorship may not be a great simile of corporate
| funding. Maybe even anecdotal. There are more academics on
| Twitter, and I havent seen evidence of censorship. (I have
| active accounts in both of them and the difference is quite
| visible of engagement in Twitter)
| rhaksw wrote:
| > There are enough significant impact conferences like
| FOCS or the TCS+ symposium, which have no/minimal
| corporate funding. In the initial years, even ICLR didn't
| have corporate sponsorship. That actually does not stop
| people from probing pressing issues.
|
| Sorry if I wrote this in the wrong place. IMO it is a
| pressing issue that has not been researched. The
| assumption among many is there is nothing bad happening.
|
| > I havent seen evidence of censorship.
|
| The site in my profile can yield examples under _" How do
| people react?"_
| [deleted]
| robert_foss wrote:
| Bad keynotes!
| bin_bash wrote:
| > Industry is the main consumer of academic CS research, and 84%
| percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding.
|
| What's the percentage in other fields? I suspect chemical
| engineering is driven by the oil industry, pharmacy by drug
| companies. I imagine aerospace is heavily driven by very few
| companies.
|
| Of course you could go get a liberal arts degree and be free from
| the tendrils of Big Dictionary but I think if we limit ourselves
| to STEM this is likely the standard. Is there an alternative? Or
| is my hypothesis wrong here?
| partido3619463 wrote:
| It's really shitty to use the acronym "FAGMA" instead of "FAANG".
| It's clear homophobia and sucks to read. (I assume it's a joke
| because (1) "FAMGA" works just as well and has no slur and (2)
| quick search for it yields very few results).
|
| Hopefully someone will take it down for this or other reasons.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I've heard "GAFAM" in the past with is significantly less
| problematic.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Its all very well to bitch and moan about "tech industry
| controlling conference funding", but the reality is that
| conferences are expensive and the money needs to come from
| somewhere.
|
| Speaking from experience. Even a decent sized "basic" conference
| (i.e. no fancy stage setups etc.) will still cost you an arm and
| a leg.
|
| You need to: - Pay the venue for the space
| - Pay the venue for the refreshments during breaks and meals
| (unless you are mean and don't feed people !) - Pay for a
| basic AV setup - Deal with registration - Pay
| for hotel rooms and travel for your team - Pay for
| various other things that soon add up (e.g. transport storage
| costs if you are shipping stuff there a few days before)
|
| So you might say, well, how about going 100% digital. Well, trust
| me, the good platforms know they are good and they charge
| accordingly.
|
| Ok you might say, "well, we'll charge registration fees". Well
| sure you might, and sure that might well cover 100% of your
| costs. But have you ever seen how registration goes for a
| conference ? It takes time for the numbers to ramp up. In the
| mean time, you need money in the bank to pay for stuff you need
| to pay for "now". And you need money in the bank as security for
| the contracts you'll be signing with the venues (if nobody turns
| up or fewer people than expected, the venue will still want some
| money off you).
|
| So, its then a question of where the money comes from. And like
| it or not, corporate sponsorship is typically the easiest way.
| The corporate structure "understands" what a conference is, so
| you won't get bogged down in discussions. The corporate way is
| also the easiest way to get nice big chunks of cash instead of
| having to beg tens or hundreds of different people.
| [deleted]
| ericmay wrote:
| Yep. I created a "hackathon" style event at a university for
| students pre-pandemic. The space was free and given by the
| university engineering college. For one day of 3 meals and
| t-shirts it was like $5,000. Partly because we _had_ to go
| through the university catering service. And that was for about
| 60 students (we planned on I think around 90?). If we needed
| event space and the university charged us that would have been
| 3x at least. And this was run with nothing but volunteers. We
| had lots of corporate sponsors and honestly it was great. They
| mentored students, they set up career fair style booths and
| just had fun and shared good info about their companies.
| Without their partnership, frankly, a lot less would have been
| achieved. It was a win-win for everyone.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| Oh god, University catering was the worst. They would happily
| charge fine dining prices for the most basic of meals, and
| would take forever to get back to you. I couldn't tell if we
| were getting the Fuck-Off rate or this was seriously what
| they charged everyone.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| So there's nothing wrong with pharma sponsored conferences for
| doctors right?
|
| Yes corporations understand conferences because there's a
| benefit to being a sponsor/running one. One needn't ignore
| conflicts of interests.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Doctors are expected to make prescriptions based solely on
| the interests of their patients, and it's a big deal if they
| don't. There's not really an analogous concern in software.
| By all means let's be aware of the incentives, but if Google
| wants to give a bunch of developers a good time as part of a
| strategy to get them using Kubernetes, I don't see an issue
| with that.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Yes corporations understand conferences because there's a
| benefit to being a sponsor/running one. One needn't ignore
| conflicts of interests.
|
| Well, there is kind of the point that they will only sponsor
| relevant events, there's not much point sponsoring an event
| outside their industry or target market.
|
| Also in terms of regulated markets such as healthcare and
| finance there may be regulatory restrictions on marketing to
| consumers. Hence it would be easier to sponsor to an industry
| conference because you would be marketing to industry
| professionals, and in that context regulatory restrictions on
| marketing are typically more relaxed because it is implied
| that the professionals should be wise enough to know when
| things are suitable.
|
| As for the specific case of doctors. As has already been
| said, they have a strict obligation to their patients first,
| a fact that is no doubt hammered into them during their many
| years at medical school.
| tootie wrote:
| Also, conferences are basically job fairs and service markets.
| Of course companies pay for them, they exist for their
| interests.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I knew some people who ran a popular regional tech conference.
| You're exactly right that it's incredibly expensive to run
| anything like this at a traditional venue.
|
| As far as I could tell, the sponsors had zero additional asks.
| They paid money in exchange for the pre-determined advertising
| package to have their logo printed everywhere. At a certain
| level they got a booth where they could hand out swag and
| recruit. They didn't direct the conference itself, though.
| Maybe it's different at the mega-conferences, but locally there
| was no indication that the sponsors were trying to capture the
| conference.
|
| The financial risk was relatively serious. At first they tried
| to keep ticket prices as low as possible but ended up losing
| money after things like refunds (more then expected) and
| surprise expenses (also more then expected).
|
| Conferences are also a lightning rod for drama. No matter how
| much they stayed ahead of current trends, there was always
| someone trying to stir up conflict and drama over something
| related to the conference or the speakers or the topics. If
| they gained enough angry supporters it resulted in a wave of
| refund requests that could ruin the profitability.
|
| Ultimately they ended the conference. I wouldn't be surprised
| if they lost more money than they brought in over the years.
| The actual benefit for them was in their careers. Being the
| organizer of a medium size tech conference is an easy way to
| make your resume look very impressive. One of them landed a
| series of impressive jobs and then was quietly let go from most
| of them because being a conference organizer doesn't
| necessarily translate to being a good manager, but that's a
| story for a different day. I'm sure he can still walk his
| resume into most companies and get it to the top of the pile
| based on his conference activities years ago.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > As far as I could tell, the sponsors had zero additional
| asks. They paid money in exchange for the pre-determined
| advertising package to have their logo printed everywhere. At
| a certain level they got a booth where they could hand out
| swag and recruit. They didn't direct the conference itself,
| though. Maybe it's different at the mega-conferences, but
| locally there was no indication that the sponsors were trying
| to capture the conference
|
| And that's exactly right. This is needlessly alarmist. A lot
| of accusations without any kind of macro analysis on what
| consequences this all has. It and also further doesn't
| provide context of this versus government funding in
| academia, along with reasonable alternatives. It also doesn't
| recognize the growth these fields have had, and how the
| landscape has changed with the scale.
| ghaff wrote:
| Furthermore, most of the people attending are being paid by
| their employers to do so. The number of tech-related events I
| would attend on my own dime and vacation could be counted on
| one hand with fingers to spare.
| [deleted]
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