or how to resist quitting my day job Mike Carey UC Irvine Beckman DB SelfAssessment Meeting October 2013 Our Field Has Contracted Metricitis Then What really cool things can I study and build ID: 374665
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Slide1
Properly Incenting Academia(or, how to resist quitting my day job)
Mike Carey
(UC Irvine)
Beckman DB Self-Assessment Meeting
October 2013Slide2
Our Field Has Contracted Metricitis
Then:
What really cool things can I study and build?
How (and when) should I disseminate my results?
How
usefu
l 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
?Slide3
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 ….)Slide4
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 (?!?)
W
e 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
M
etricitis
is not yet in Stage 4 ….