Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Academic (computer science) conferences as marketplaces

Eppstein and Vazirani propose a centralized marketplace for computer science conferences:

A Market for TCS Papers??
November 19, 2019 by Kevin Leyton-Brown

By David Eppstein & Vijay Vazirani

"No, not to make theoreticians rich! Besides, who will buy your papers anyway? (Quite the opposite, you will be lucky if you can convince someone to take them for free, just for sake of publicity!) What we are proposing is a market in which no money changes hands – a matching market – for matching papers to conferences.

"At present we are faced with massive inefficiencies in the conference process – numerous researchers are trapped in unending cycles of submit … get reject … incorporate comments … resubmit — often to the next deadline which has been conveniently arranged a couple of days down the road so the unwitting participants are conditioned into mindlessly keep coming back for more, much like Pavlov’s dog.

"We are proposing a matching market approach to finally obliterate this madness. We believe such a market is feasible using the following ideas. No doubt our scheme will have some drawbacks; however, as should be obvious, the advantages far outweigh them.

"First, for co-located symposia within a larger umbrella conference, such as the
conferences within ALGO or FCRC, the following process should be a no-brainer:

1). Ensure a common deadline for all symposia; denote the latter by S.

2). Let R denote the set of researchers who wish to submit one paper to a symposium in this umbrella conference – assume that researchers submitting more than one paper will have multiple names, one for each submission. Each researcher will provide a strict preference order over the subset of symposia to which they wish to submit their paper. Let G denote the bipartite graph with vertex sets (R, S) and an edge (r, s) only if researcher r chose symposium s.

3). The umbrella conference will have a large common PC with experts representing all of its symposia. The process of assigning papers to PC members will of course use G in a critical way.

"Once papers are reviewed by PC members and external reviewers, each symposium will rank its submissions using its own criteria of acceptance. We believe the overhead of ranking each paper multiple times is minimal since that is just an issue of deciding how “on-topic” a paper is – an easy task once the reviews of the paper are available.

4). Finally, using all these preference lists, a researcher-proposing stable matching is computed using the Gale-Shapley algorithm. As is well-known, this mechanism will be dominant strategy incentive compatible for researchers." 

"With a little extra effort, a similar scheme can also be used for a group of conferences at diverse locations but similar times, such as some of the annual summer theory conferences, STOC, ICALP, ESA, STAC, WADS/SWAT, etc.

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