Btw, this is one of the areas where Yahoo! has a lot of success. Yahoo! Research in its current form exists for around 5 years, but it has already surpassed MIT.
I'm not sure who voted you up, but the second part of this comment looks trollish (apologies if it wasn't).
For a starter, this is a very small subset of computer science conferences (e.g., the main software engineering and programming language conferences are missing). I'm not sure in which field Yahoo! Research works (looks like data mining), but in SE and PL, they are inexistent.
Best paper awards are just one metric among many. Citations, venue impact factor, number of publications are other (imperfect) metrics. It's probably fair to say that MIT and other big universities and corporate labs (IBM and Microsoft) have high scores in all of these metrics, whereas Yahoo! Research is still too young and too small to compete with even smaller but dynamic universities w.r.t. these metrics.
Not Microsoft, it's Microsoft Research. They probably are the best of the best. The cameras and firmware for the Kinect were made there, for example. http://research.microsoft.com/
Only according to this list. I totally understand how incomplete and random this metric is to measure the real impact.
Regarding "buying brains", being at Y!R is a great experience for me and it matches all the perks of being in academia (you can publish almost anything, work with students, teach at universities if you want, etc).
Thanks for the link, I really like the site. However, my interests are more in the area of programming languages (PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA, etc.). Does anybody know of something similar for ACM SIGPLAN conferences? (I know they hand out "most influential" awards after 10 years consideration time, but "best papers" in general for many conferences should give a pretty good picture of the state of any field over time...)
What is your specialization? I can send some survey papers your way. (I already tweet them as I find them.)
I go through 2-10 papers a day, nearly on PL research, semantics, type-theory and implementation lore. There are a bunch of us on HN, some I correspond with via email, others twitter.
Hi, PL reserach in general is my cup of tea, too. I find the idea of a "best paper" catalogue for conferences in the PLDI-area in general very appealing; similar to the site the OP posted. Since you mention that we're not alone, we should probably pool our resources, what do you think? (Probably host a site somewhere...)
Just curious, how long does it take to "go through" 2-10 papers a day? Do you read in detail, only if the abstract grabs you, skim for important points...?
Don't know how long it takes me, but it's usually from the moment I want up until 3PM or so. I usually get up craving research (when I am on the up and up; other days I hate research and miss the bits and bytes, starting my day in Emacs.)
I rarely read the abstracts. I find interesting papers in the references of other interesting papers.
I usually skip the first 15% of the introductory prose, go to the meat, jump to the conclusions and "future work", and if I think the paper covers enough ground, I fast forward to its references and see if the authors are aware of the seminal works. Only then do I actually read it.
For the truly important ones, you're already aware for their findings from texts, since they're cited often. For the useless ones (the majority) you're just interested in one idea, technique, finding or implementation method, and it's easy to zoom in. But from time to time you will come across a diamond in the rough that isn't as well known as it should.
Would you mind sending some my way too? My specialization is more in applications; in libraries/domain specific languages, particularly ones for AI/statistics applications and functional logic programming.
The email in your profile is broken. Here is what I tried to send you:
Hi there partition,
I can't just send papers your way, but you're free to ask me questions
and I will relay to my social circle of PL snobs (most of whom are in my
twitter follows anyway)
1. This is a very limited subset of conferences/fields.
2. Google Research is younger than Microsoft Research.
3. Google Research is really mixed with their product development whereas Microsoft (and IBM) Research are more isolated so they can focus on fundamental research and publications (there is some transfer...). A Google representative once said in a software engineering conference: "Come work at Google Research, you'll work on real and interesting research problems like GMail". Gmail==Research? Really?
I don't know if GMail itself is "research", but I'm sure there is definitely a lot of systems research going on behind the scenes. I don't know that they use it for GMail, but the Google File System paper was interesting. Allowing their users (millions?) to quickly search their email (tens to hundreds of thousands?) must have some interesting networking/distributed systems research questions.
That said, some more publications/insight on those systems would be nice to see.
Note that it is a very limited metric, I would not try to deduce too much from it. Also, MS research recrutes a lot of people top in their fields (up to fields medal/nobel prize kind of level), which helps tremendously when you only look only at metrics for the top.
I find this is really the best way. It also finds papers authors post on their websites which has been becoming extremely common (kind of like self-publishing)
Personally, I much prefer searching citeseer, as most of the papers I've found through google scholar are behind paywalls, while virtually every paper on citeseer is free.
If I can't find a paper through citesser, I usually just do a regular google search, and often find the paper elsewhere on the web. Google scholar is pretty much my last resort, and I really haven't had much luck finding freely downloadable papers through it.
the title is wrong. it's not every "best paper": notably all best papers before 2005 are missing for ICML.
in terms of metrics of research quality, not all conferences are equal, and "best" papers are often selected by a relatively small group of people whose decision isn't really validated too much.
sorry, it seemed to cover most of the conferences I knew about. where would one start looking for something like older best paper awards? it seems like ICML only started giving out best paper awards since 2005
I guess it's the old truism of not being able to prove something does not exist
Agree, title is misleading, may be put up to attract eyeballs. It doesn't include few other prominent conferences also such as USENIX conferences FAST and LISA.
"Every best paper from CS conferences" does not really sound like what this site does -- list best papers from 11 CS conferences, a marginal fraction of how many CS conferences are out there.
CHI is a huge conference. More than 1000 papers were submitted last year. A designated committee chooses 1% of the submitted papers to receive the best papers awards which explains the number of awarded papers.
Having 2 or 3 best paper awards I can understand, but having a dozen is cheating. Many of the other top conferences like WWW, AAAI, and SIGIR have nearly 1,000 submissions also and they only have a single best paper award.
