Confessions of a researchaholic

Since HKU asked for this and resumes do not usually contain failures, I reckon it could be a good idea to share my paper acceptance rate.

For SIGGRAPH (the top venue for computer graphics and interactive techniques, in case you don’t know), my life-time acceptance rate is 36%, and 40% in the last 5 years.

As a milestone of seniority, I couldn’t recall how many SIGGRAPH papers I have until doing this calculation.
🙂

I am not keeping track of my submissions to other venues (such as CHI, UIST, I3D, TVCG, EGSR, etc.), but I am pretty sure the overall rate is at least 50%, and much higher for some venues, such as EGSR (100%).

For reference, the overall acceptance rates of many graphics venues can be found under http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/.

I didn't know I have submitted anything to a conference until during the bidding/conflict process :v

— Li-Yi Wei (@liyiwei) August 18, 2016

In his PhD application, a student indicated that he is collaborating with a famous professor on a recent SIGGRAPH project.

I asked that professor about the student. He told me that the project has 20 students (most are not co-authors), and the particular student is probably not even a secondary helper.

In comparison, most of my projects so far involve 0 or 1 student, and none over 2 students.
🙂

When I was in grad school I thought UI is about tuning widgets and doing user studies (a lot of research did exactly that). I preferred working on algorithms because they seem more interesting and more fundamental.

Later on, I realized how wrong I was. User interface is crucial as long as humans remain biological and machines remain mechanical.
A good UI can save a not so good algorithm, but not vice versa.
And UI research can also be fun and fundamental.

Some people told me that they prefer Word over Latex for paper writing due to a more direct WYSIWYG interface.

It is true that using Latex is more like coding than writing. But is Word really more WYSIWYG?

One of my PhD students, J, is interning with a top HCI lab that prefers Word. J already has first-authored multiple SIGGRAPH papers via Latex, but had difficulty figuring out how to use Word, such as citations and cross references, even after the internship mentor provided a previous paper Word file for example.

The main problem of a binary file like Word is that it shows what is there but not how it got there.
Take citations as an example. Even starting with a complete paper, there is no way to tell how to add a new citation just by looking at the file alone. One has to search online or via the in app help.

In contrast, a source file like Latex shows how everything is done, even though we have to take an extra compilation step to see what it looks like. But that can be a single command with a makefile, which also clearly shows how to build everything.

The ideal tool should allow authoring in both directions: on the source (like Latex) with outcome immediately visible (like Word), or on the outcome (like Word) with the source automatically modified.
But for now, Latex is more WYSIWYG than Word for me.