Observe this dichotomy:
- Folks on one side: grad school/academia is bliss, its paradise, etc
- Folks on other side: A significant % of students in Cali were homeless during their PhD, postdocs and profs cannot afford daycare

https://twitter.com/zhang_chuchu/status/1592605748638670848

We significantly underpay everyone in academia, right from grad students to professors.

The folks who are not in High Cost-of-Living locations don't really feel it, and hence do not support salary increases

Since folks are talking about alternate twitter destinations:

@danrkports and I run the Computer Science Slack: bit.ly/cs-slack-22

- Over 3400 members
- Both industry and academia
- Channels for areas (e.g, networking), hiring, internships, conf announcements

1/n @danrkports - We have an anonymous channel where folks can ask for advice (students use this a lot)
- We have six private invite-only channels: Women in CS (run by @schemeprincess), grad students, industry, faculty lounge, faculty candidates

2/n

Okay, another question via DM: how to decide between academia versus industry job versus post-doc? A 🧵

There are a number of differences between academia and an industry job, but to me it boils down to three things:
1) Students
2) What you want to work on
3) Money First, students. This is the biggest difference, and the reason why I became a professor.

If you enjoy mentoring students and seeing them grow, and if you enjoy teaching, academia is a good place to do this. You get interns in industry, but its not quite the same.

So someone asked me in DMs how I figured out I liked research and to go for a PhD.

When I joined @WisconsinCS, it was actually for a Masters degree, and I hadn't planned on doing a PhD at all. While doing the Masters, I got involved in research with Remzi and Andrea. @WisconsinCS Near the end of the masters degree, I got a software engineering job and was actually all set to leave academia and join industry.

But Remzi and Andrea convinced me to stay for six more months, and if I didn't like research by then, that I would still be able to get the dev job

So at the recent CI Fellows panel organized by @aruna__b and team, I got asked about being on social media as an academic, pros and cons, and how to go about doing it.

I think this would be widely useful, so a quick thread about this 🧵 1/n I think a goal that many academics share is having increased visibility for our work. We don't want to just publish papers, we want folks to read them, be influenced by them, build on them, etc.

One traditional way folks did this is by visiting other places and giving talks

So the stated reason for censoring @timnitGebru's paper (and subsequently leading to her dismissal from Google) seems to be that it ignored relevant research, and this is pretty much BS. This is the job of conf reviewers, and not the job of Google. @timnitGebru If I wrote a paper at a company, and undisclosed folks wanted me to retract it because they felt the scholarship wasn't good enough, I would be pretty annoyed too.

The formal review process is for making sure that the paper isn't leaking company secrets etc.

I point out many problems with academia in general, but this might paint a picture that academia is this miserable, depressing place.

I actually enjoy my job a lot, and there is nothing I would rather be doing if I had infinite money :) A quick thread on what I like: I love, love working with my students. This is the reason why I became a prof. I love both working with my group on research, and teaching the enthusiastic undergrads at @UTCompSci :) It is a joy to work with/teach these folks.

On #ShutDownSTEM #ShutDownAcademia day, some rambling thoughts on academia, inequalities, and power differentials. I've expressed some of these thoughts before, but it is a good idea to stop and reflect on this day. The first thing that comes to mind after my short four years as a professor is that academia depends too much on volunteer work. Our work, and our time, is massively undervalued. Our students should get paid more. Professors should get paid more, especially in non STEAm areas.

So taking a shot at this: what makes a good SOSP/OSDI submission?

Caveats: purely my opinion, and likely others in the community will disagree.

A thread. (1/n)

https://twitter.com/ilyasergey/status/1252659054209458176

1) The most important aspect is problem selection. The problem has to be timely and significant. By reading a lot of SOSP/OSDI papers, you develop a sense of whether a given problem is significant enough. If you tackle the "wrong" problem, paper won't get accepted no matter what.

This is a good article going into detail as to why open access in ACM is expensive: its used for pay for K-12 education and other programs. I have some problems with the article though. A thread.

https://twitter.com/clifflampe/status/1218634926188322816

First off, it suggests that open access is expensive, and that we need to have some revenue stream to cover costs. This is not true in CS, where type-setting, copy-editing etc are done by the authors themselves. For example, JMLR is an open-access journal without *any* costs.

A quick thread on why academics (especially students) should be active on Twitter. 1/n

The short version: Twitter is like a global pub where fellow academics all hang out. You get both company for yourself and visibility for your work. You also learn about cool work from others! To start off with, Twitter is amazing at helping folks find and form a network. I've met so many folks here I've never met in real life. This usually translates into fun meetings when we travel and bump into each other! This networking is crucial - it's why conferences exist.

IMO, life as a researcher is similar to the life of an artiste (h/t @johnregehr). You have a vision to do something, and you receive patronage from folks who believe in you and your vision. The primary motivation to do this is because you ENJOY it. @johnregehr The best motivations are always intrinsic. If you are too hung up on "solving the most important problem in the field", you will be miserable. If you do science just so you can get a Nobel or some other award, you will be miserable.

A quick thread on working with students remotely. As the saying goes, "talent is uniformly distributed, but opportunity is not".

I've had success working with indian undergrads remotely, and found some of my awesome students via this approach: @RohanKadekodi and @Ponnapalli95 @RohanKadekodi @Ponnapalli95 To provide some background for this: indian grad students not in the IITs or NITs have low exposure to research, and very few opportunities to do research in their undergrad. This is despite many students being super smart, motivated, and hard working.

So my students are off for summer research internships, and I gave them some advice. This is widely applicable, so sharing it here.

First off, the worst way you can spend your internship is to focus exclusively on the internship project and talk only with your mentor all summer. Your co-interns are going to be an awesome set of students: take the time to get to know them! I've made lots of great friends through internships, and these folks get what you are going through, since they are in similar circumstances themselves.

Some believe that writing a scientific paper is a dry process, devoid of creativity.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Writing a paper is more like making a movie! If you are the lead author/prof, you are the director of the movie. Just as with a movie, a scientific paper starts with a vision. Not all the details have been worked out, but a high-level idea is there, and you are excited about the final product once it is done.

You then start putting together the paper/movie piece by piece.

This is an amazing series of interviews of successful professors by younger professors. There are all sorts of interesting tidbits and advice in here. Highly recommend all junior profs read this!

https://twitter.com/realhamed/status/1028243934097682433

To highlight some of the interesting tidbits: (my paraphrasing) "You should fight like a dog. You have fought so hard to get here, don't give up now!"

"Its really an art to ask money for a squid!"

"Don't take on every student who comes your way"

A quick thread on the @reportbee Remote Research Fellowship 2018! The goal was to encourage more indian students to pursue research. We wanted to make sure it was on their radar as a possible option after undergrad.

https://twitter.com/vj_chidambaram/status/1024846135121391621

@reportbee ReportBee would sponsor one student for a remote research internship. The internship would last for a year, giving the student time to meaningfully contribute to a project. The stipend would help the student allocate time for the project.

Folks heading to #atc18 check out our work on TxFS, the Texas Transactional File System!

cs.utexas.edu/~vijay/papers/…

We built TxFS in only 5K LOC by utilizing the file-system journal to get atomic and durable transactions. Providing isolation for TxFS transactions was a hard problem. We customized isolation to each kernel data structure. For data structures like pages which have a narrow access interface, we provide eager conflict detection.

Seems pretty clear that civil rights for all minority groups in the US will be drastically lowered during the next decade. What should academia’s response be to this? Can we even honestly ask minority students to come here and study anymore? Most students will want to work and live here after studying here. That is increasingly becoming difficult. Perhaps Canada or Europe are the more rational choices?

This is an interesting discussion. I do not like in-person PCs either, and feel its a waste of time and money. But I've also been hearing about how lack of in-person PCs (among other things) has been deteriorating review quality in SIGMOD/VLDB.

https://twitter.com/lionel_c_briand/status/1010855238742560769

I do not think PCs should be the point where networking should happen. That stuff should happen at the more inclusive conferences. The learning you get from a in-person PC can be done remotely also. So the primary argument seems to be in-person PCs increase review quality.

I just reviewed a bunch of OSDI papers, a lot of them will get rejected due to either writing or evaluation.

So here's a quick thread on how to do good evaluation in a systems paper.

Others have said this before, but I think it bears repeating. IMO, there are three things that you are hoping to get out of evaluation.

1. What are the strengths and weakness of your system?

2. How does it compare to the state-of-the-art approaches?

3. How does it improve the performance of real applications?