Monday, March 19, 2012
Reminder: conference paper deadline for IJCCI 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI) 2012 is 19 April 2012. This conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain, 5-7 October, 2012.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Reminder: paper submission deadline for ISICA 2012
A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the International Symposium on Intelligence Computing and Applications (ISICA) 2012 is 15 April 2012. This conference will be held in Wuhan, China, 27-28 October, 2012.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Reminder: paper deadline for ICCCI 2012
A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 4th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI) 2012 is 15 April 2012. This conference will be held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 28-30 November, 2012.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Reminder: paper submission deadline: IEEE CIG 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games (IEEE CIG) 2012 is 15 April 2012. This conference will be held in Granada, Spain, 12-15 September, 2012.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Reminder: paper submission deadline for CBR-MD 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the International Workshop Case-Based Reasoning (CBR-MD) 2012 is 13 April 2012. This workshop will be held in Berlin, Germany, 20 July 2012.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Publishing or perishing 3
Following this previous post, I've found a few more articles about the dismissal of staff from the University of Sydney, for not publishing at least four papers in three years. This article is scathing of the university management, while Alex Burns, in this post, is in a similar vein to what I wrote: that four papers in three years is not an excessive number and that most academics should be able to meet it.
The most interesting post I found was this one, from David McGloin at the University of Dundee, where he lists a number of reasons someone might not reach the target number of publications. This is useful, as it informs as to what strategies academics could follow to avoid finding themselves in this sort of situation. Below, I reproduce each of his points, along with my responses:
It could be that you’re on the brink of some big breakthrough and the focus of this has taken many years to complete.
It is very dangerous for any academic to focus on one project to the exclusion of all others. Also, any project can be broken up into small, publishable chunks. That is, rather than writing up a single magnum opus of a paper at the end of the project, one should publish several smaller papers during the course of the work. This is more likely to make funding agencies happy as well, as it shows them that you are being consistently productive.
It may be that you’ve had bad luck with papers getting accepted, or have been doing good work, but maybe aiming to high up the journal league table.
Reformatting a rejected paper for another journal doesn't take very long. Waiting for reviews takes a long time (six months or more for some of my papers) but again, no academic should be working on just one project at a time. Everyone gets a period of bad luck with getting papers accepted (I had a long string of rejections throughout 2010 - I made up for it in 2011). The important thing is to have more than one project on the go at any one time, and to have a fast turn-around on rejected papers. If you follow a journal article submission strategy similar to the one I suggest, you should already have a good idea of other journals you could submit to.
It could be that you have had a run of poor luck on grant funding, and have not had the support to do your work and write up results, in terms of PhD students, postdocs, or simply a lack of equipment.
I do tend to agree with this point, especially for fields that need a lot of equipment to get results. I will point out, though, that having a good publication record will help with getting research grants.
Maybe a series of experiments didn’t work, but the next one will (and it will win a Nobel Prize).
Again, it is very important to pursue more than one research project at a time. That way, if one set of experiments doesn't work out, you can still publish the results from another.
Maybe your research output is highly subjective (think works by artists) and the critics didn’t like your last show.
This is more of a problem for researchers in the humanities. As a scientist I can't really comment on this, other than to point again to my responses above.
Maybe your research rivals knew about your employment conditions and decided to reject your last paper (to make it to the magic four) to get you sacked.
This is the most frightening point. Not only is such behavior completely unethical, it undermines the entire peer-review process. Anyone engaging in such behavior - rejecting papers just because the author is a rival - should be sacked immediately. If this does happen, it is also a failure on the part of the journal editors. Most journal submission systems allow the authors to list reviewers they are opposed to. Any editor who sends a paper to a reviewer who they have reasonable suspicion is a rival of the author, is failing to do their job.
Or maybe, just maybe you didn’t feel the need to publish every last little bit of work to avoid saturating the journals and keep the overall quality of published work high enough to make it bearable to read them.
This is a non sequitor. Submitting a lot of papers does not mean a lack of quality in the papers. As I mentioned above, you can break your project up into smaller, publishable chunks and submit a paper on each. Planning your research program is an essential skill for the professional researcher. Also, if the quality of the paper is so low that it's unreadable, how would it get published to begin with?
Maybe you published one Nature paper a year over the last three years and nothing else, and they each got 500 citations
This is one of those situations that could occur, but is really unlikely. The people I know who do publish in Nature, are the people who publish 20+ papers (journal articles) per year! I really can't see how anyone could be good enough to publish three papers in a row in Nature yet not be good enough to get one more paper published in another journal.
Publish or perish is the rule of academia, and has been for a long time. Sensible and positive ways you can publish without perishing are:
The most interesting post I found was this one, from David McGloin at the University of Dundee, where he lists a number of reasons someone might not reach the target number of publications. This is useful, as it informs as to what strategies academics could follow to avoid finding themselves in this sort of situation. Below, I reproduce each of his points, along with my responses:
It could be that you’re on the brink of some big breakthrough and the focus of this has taken many years to complete.
It is very dangerous for any academic to focus on one project to the exclusion of all others. Also, any project can be broken up into small, publishable chunks. That is, rather than writing up a single magnum opus of a paper at the end of the project, one should publish several smaller papers during the course of the work. This is more likely to make funding agencies happy as well, as it shows them that you are being consistently productive.
It may be that you’ve had bad luck with papers getting accepted, or have been doing good work, but maybe aiming to high up the journal league table.
Reformatting a rejected paper for another journal doesn't take very long. Waiting for reviews takes a long time (six months or more for some of my papers) but again, no academic should be working on just one project at a time. Everyone gets a period of bad luck with getting papers accepted (I had a long string of rejections throughout 2010 - I made up for it in 2011). The important thing is to have more than one project on the go at any one time, and to have a fast turn-around on rejected papers. If you follow a journal article submission strategy similar to the one I suggest, you should already have a good idea of other journals you could submit to.
It could be that you have had a run of poor luck on grant funding, and have not had the support to do your work and write up results, in terms of PhD students, postdocs, or simply a lack of equipment.
I do tend to agree with this point, especially for fields that need a lot of equipment to get results. I will point out, though, that having a good publication record will help with getting research grants.
Maybe a series of experiments didn’t work, but the next one will (and it will win a Nobel Prize).
Again, it is very important to pursue more than one research project at a time. That way, if one set of experiments doesn't work out, you can still publish the results from another.
Maybe your research output is highly subjective (think works by artists) and the critics didn’t like your last show.
This is more of a problem for researchers in the humanities. As a scientist I can't really comment on this, other than to point again to my responses above.
Maybe your research rivals knew about your employment conditions and decided to reject your last paper (to make it to the magic four) to get you sacked.
This is the most frightening point. Not only is such behavior completely unethical, it undermines the entire peer-review process. Anyone engaging in such behavior - rejecting papers just because the author is a rival - should be sacked immediately. If this does happen, it is also a failure on the part of the journal editors. Most journal submission systems allow the authors to list reviewers they are opposed to. Any editor who sends a paper to a reviewer who they have reasonable suspicion is a rival of the author, is failing to do their job.
Or maybe, just maybe you didn’t feel the need to publish every last little bit of work to avoid saturating the journals and keep the overall quality of published work high enough to make it bearable to read them.
This is a non sequitor. Submitting a lot of papers does not mean a lack of quality in the papers. As I mentioned above, you can break your project up into smaller, publishable chunks and submit a paper on each. Planning your research program is an essential skill for the professional researcher. Also, if the quality of the paper is so low that it's unreadable, how would it get published to begin with?
Maybe you published one Nature paper a year over the last three years and nothing else, and they each got 500 citations
This is one of those situations that could occur, but is really unlikely. The people I know who do publish in Nature, are the people who publish 20+ papers (journal articles) per year! I really can't see how anyone could be good enough to publish three papers in a row in Nature yet not be good enough to get one more paper published in another journal.
Publish or perish is the rule of academia, and has been for a long time. Sensible and positive ways you can publish without perishing are:
- pursuing more than one research project at a time
- collaborating widely (this is pretty easy to do in computational intelligence, as our algorithms are so widely applicable
- breaking your research into small, publishable chunks
- rapid turn-around on rejected papers
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Reminder: paper submission deadline for CISE 2012
A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 4th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering (CISE) 2012 is 11 June 2012. This conference will be held in Wuhan, China, December 14-16, 2012.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Conference paper deadline: IDA 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the Eleventh International Symposium on Intelligence Data Analysis (IDA) 2012 is 12 May 2012. This symposium will be held in Helsinki, Finland, 27-27 October, 2012.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Call for papers: ELM 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the International Symposium on Extreme Learning Machines (ELM) 2012 is 1 June, 2012. This symposium will be held in Singapore 11-13 December, 2012.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Conference paper deadline: ICANN 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN) 2012 is 19 March 2012. This conference will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland, 11-14 September, 2012.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Conference paper deadline: CISIS 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the 5th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS) 2012 is 20 March 2012. This conference will be held in Ostrava, Czech Republic, 5-8 September, 2012.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Reminder: conference paper deadline for EANN
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 13th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN 2012) is 31 March 2012. This conference will be held in London, UK, 20-23 September, 2012.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Publishing or perishing 2
Or, big trouble in little USyd.
In a previous post, I discussed the principle of "Publish or perish". This phrase is a succinct way of saying that the most important metric by which an academic is judged, is their publication record: those who do not publish enough will not be valued as highly as those who publish more. Recent developments in Australian academia have made this literally true.
The University of Sydney is dismissing 100 academics who have not published at least four times in the last three years. Early career researchers are apparently exempt from this threshold, so it is only senior academics (presumably permanent staff members) who are at risk. In other words, they are in senior positions, yet they have not published, so they are perishing.
To put that number (four papers is three years) in perspective, I'm not a permanent staff member, yet in the last three years I've published fifteen times, and have more than a dozen publications in the pipeline (I expect to publish them this year). While I am currently full-time research, I have taught full-time in the past, yet I still managed to publish research. During my final year teaching, I published papers, was finishing my PhD, and taught / administered two undergrad courses. I got married that year, too.
The only thing that garners any sympathy from me is that claims are being made that late last year academic staff were told that an average publication rate of 0.8 per year (four papers in five years) would be satisfactory. If that is true, then management have moved the goal-posts, which strikes me as rather unfair. However, even when I was working as a post-doc at the University of Sydney, I was expected to produce at least two papers per year. In my current position, my target output is at least six per year (I got ten last year, and I'm on track to get twelve this year - the best way to meet a target, is to aim to exceed it). Did senior lecturers really think they could get away with less? "Publish or perish" is a very old saying.
Now, the University of Sydney is taking this action to make up for a massive short-fall in income (the exact reasons for this sudden short-fall are rather murky) but what would the effect be if this hard form of publish or perish were enforced more often at universities? It might have the effect of sweeping out those academics who have become complacent in their positions, or who are approaching the end of their academic careers (that is, they are no longer capable of performing research at the level required). This would in turn free up positions for younger staff, who are capable of producing publications, yet can't find permanent positions because they're being held by unproductive senior staff. Are there any other professions where those who do not perform, get to keep their jobs? Of course not. A major part of being an academic is publishing: if you're not publishing, you're not doing your job. If you're not doing your job, do you deserve to keep it?
On a humane level, I'm sorry for the people who are losing their jobs. But honestly, I wish this standard were applied at more universities.
In a previous post, I discussed the principle of "Publish or perish". This phrase is a succinct way of saying that the most important metric by which an academic is judged, is their publication record: those who do not publish enough will not be valued as highly as those who publish more. Recent developments in Australian academia have made this literally true.
The University of Sydney is dismissing 100 academics who have not published at least four times in the last three years. Early career researchers are apparently exempt from this threshold, so it is only senior academics (presumably permanent staff members) who are at risk. In other words, they are in senior positions, yet they have not published, so they are perishing.
To put that number (four papers is three years) in perspective, I'm not a permanent staff member, yet in the last three years I've published fifteen times, and have more than a dozen publications in the pipeline (I expect to publish them this year). While I am currently full-time research, I have taught full-time in the past, yet I still managed to publish research. During my final year teaching, I published papers, was finishing my PhD, and taught / administered two undergrad courses. I got married that year, too.
The only thing that garners any sympathy from me is that claims are being made that late last year academic staff were told that an average publication rate of 0.8 per year (four papers in five years) would be satisfactory. If that is true, then management have moved the goal-posts, which strikes me as rather unfair. However, even when I was working as a post-doc at the University of Sydney, I was expected to produce at least two papers per year. In my current position, my target output is at least six per year (I got ten last year, and I'm on track to get twelve this year - the best way to meet a target, is to aim to exceed it). Did senior lecturers really think they could get away with less? "Publish or perish" is a very old saying.
Now, the University of Sydney is taking this action to make up for a massive short-fall in income (the exact reasons for this sudden short-fall are rather murky) but what would the effect be if this hard form of publish or perish were enforced more often at universities? It might have the effect of sweeping out those academics who have become complacent in their positions, or who are approaching the end of their academic careers (that is, they are no longer capable of performing research at the level required). This would in turn free up positions for younger staff, who are capable of producing publications, yet can't find permanent positions because they're being held by unproductive senior staff. Are there any other professions where those who do not perform, get to keep their jobs? Of course not. A major part of being an academic is publishing: if you're not publishing, you're not doing your job. If you're not doing your job, do you deserve to keep it?
On a humane level, I'm sorry for the people who are losing their jobs. But honestly, I wish this standard were applied at more universities.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Conference paper deadline: FCTA 2012
The deadline for submitting papers to the International Conference on Fuzzy Computation Theory and Applications (FCTA) 2012 is 19 April 2012. This conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain, 5-7 October, 2012.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Reminder: paper submission deadline for UCNC 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 11th Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) 2012 is 26 March 2012. This conference will be held in Orleans, France, 3-6 September, 2012.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Reminder: paper submission deadline for CIDM 2012
A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the Third International Workshop on Computational Intelligence for Disaster Management (CIDM) 2012 is March 25 2012. This workshop will be held in Bucharest, Romania, 19-21 September 2012.
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