This is by far the longest PhD defense I have ever attended, and I have attended many.
The first half was spent on the presentation, with the second half on discussions (among thesis committee members and later the candidate) about how to deal with the lack of publications.
I enjoyed the first half much more than the second.
Since my company allow us to report academic services as part of our volunteering hours for matching donations*, I have been keeping track of mine in a spreadsheet (down to the levels of the hours/minutes spent in each paper across different stages of the review processes).
According to the spreadsheet, so far this year I have spent 190+ (!) hours in total, including TVCG AE and paper committees in SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, EG, EGSR, HPG, etc., mostly during my “spare time” in the evenings and weekends.
I won’t be able to serve for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia next year, so hopefully I can get back some time for other activities.
* For Adobe folks: remember to report your volunteering hours before the end of the year.
(I need to write this down while I still feel the slight amount of excitement.)
Recently I have been involved in two projects for automatic video captioning, one for a research paper and the other for a product feature.
The research paper will be presented at UIST 2023; see this page for more details.
The product feature can be accessed via this page; if you have any feedback feel free to let me know.
The two projects share some high-level ideas (such as maintaining temporal coherence for the captions while optimizing their spatial parameters with respect to the video content), but the specific methods and implementations are quite different.
Shipping a product involves a lot of testing and tuning to ensure robust experiences for a wide range of users and use cases (often beyond what the creators can initially anticipate), while publishing a research paper often requires a lot of work in writing and presentation that can be a dominating factor in deciding its acceptance and dissemination.
I heard some PhD students making fun of the SIGGRAPH dual/conference track format of (at most) 7 pages of texts and figures plus 2 pages of figures only, thinking it is something “new”.
They are too young to realize this is not new at all, and probably very old.
Before I even started my PhD program, the proceedings (1) were physically printed and (2) had separate color pages to reduce costs.
So it was common for people to put all their color figures at separate pages in the end of the paper.
I also remember that the first few times I submitted papers to SIGGRAPH, I had to mail in 6 copies of printed papers and VHS tapes for videos early enough so that they would arrive at the conference office before the deadline (while also late enough to maximize the time I can work on the submissions).
Imagine the horrors of debugging ink-jet printers and video production software/hardware in the 1990s.
I heard the story (not confirmed) that Dennis Zorin (when he was a PhD student) and (his then adviser) Peter Shroeder had a Fedex guy waiting in their office while finalizing their submission(s).
I even hand carried all the physical materials from MSR Asia’s submission to SIGGRAPH 2006 in a large suitcase (like a smuggler) and flew from Beijing to Redmond to reduce the total shipping time.
Nowadays, we can submit everything electronically at the last minute prior to the deadline, with network bandwidth/latency/reliability being the only bottleneck.
During a recent gathering people have talked about how some of my works have been unfairly treated.
Beforehand I was actually not aware of the situation, in any case these are already published works for everyone to judge, and I don’t see how it could have any tangible impacts on my life and career at this stage.
However, since now it has been brought to my awareness, I feel that I should do something about it for the sake of sportsmanship, as it does not seem proper to leave it as is.
Thus, I have decided to stop reviewing duties for that venue until the situation is remedied.
As far as I remember I have never turned down review/committee requests (aside from potential conflicts) and I am pretty sure I have done my fair share of services for that venue even if I stop right now.
If I want to continue volunteering my time for a cause, I need to know it is at least fair.
Update: I realized that the decision was made by a few individuals who do not necessarily represent the whole community, and in any case this event seems quite insignificant in retrospect. Plus I still enjoy reading and discussing about research, so I have yet to turn down any paper review and committee invitations so far.
Some random thoughts after just finished the SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 paper committee meetings:
I am thrilled to see several of my previous students (or “shadow advisees” to be precise) in the committee.
I hope this has been a good experience for them, even though probably not as good as in-person meetings where they can socialize with other committee members.
(Not as an excuse for shirking review duties, but I also wonder if this is a sign that I can fade away from these committee services soon.)
The meeting time is not ideal for people in Asia, and several of them were not able to present their papers.
I wonder if PC members’ time zones can be an additional variable to optimize for the HepCat paper queues for future virtual PC meetings.
Like hybrid work, I wonder if we can have hybrid PC meetings in the future, where some PC members can meet in person while others can join remotely depending on their preferences and budget supports from ACM/grants/institutions.
Given the increasingly large number of submissions, I wonder if at some point everyone in the graphics community will serve in the PC.
From a podcast I bumped into this paper about the economics job market rumors (EJMR) forum, which is a place for anonymous discussions about the job market for economists.
I was initially interested in the methodology (in particular reverse hashing) and results in the paper, but then I found the EJMR site itself to be even more fascinating as it sheds more light on human nature than economics (which is already a relatively “well to do” branch of social/political science).
After serving as an associate editor (AE) for a few journals (e.g., ToG, CGF, TVCG) and paper committee members for a few conferences/journals (e.g., SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics), here is my personal take on the similarities and differences between the two roles.
Similarities: a main (and probably the most important) task for both is to recruit and manage reviewers.
Differences: an AE does not have to read the papers (even though I read every single one so far just to make sure my final recommendation is sound) and can decide the final recommendation without consulting other AEs, while a paper committee member has to read all the papers and present the recommendations in a committee meeting before the final decisions can be made.
Are you a paper committee paper or journal associate editor (AE) who want to increase the likelihood of reviewers responding positively to your invitations?
Here are some tips based on my own experience:
Instead of a machine-generated generic email, craft a custom message telling the candidate reviewer why you think they are a good fit for the paper, such as their background respect to the topic or specific components of the paper.
You should have this information already when deciding to invite that particular reviewer.
Add some personal greetings such as if the reviewer has a recent job change or life event, a new paper, or someone you both know, which could be found on their social media or personal website.
Do so particularly if you know the reviewer (or someone close to them like their collaborator/advisor) personally.
If you already read the paper, provide some estimation of the time commitment required for reviewing the paper, e.g., “I think it will take you about 2 hours to review this paper”.
If you have accepted review requests from that reviewer in the past, mention this as well as a hint of reciprocity.
This is another reason to accept review requests if you have the bandwidth.
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