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Properly Incenting Academia (or, how to resist quitting my day job)

Properly Incenting Academia (or, how to resist quitting my day job). Mike Carey (UC Irvine) Beckman DB Self-Assessment Meeting October 2013. Our Field Has Contracted Metricitis. Then: What really cool things can I study and build? How (and when) should I disseminate my results?

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Properly Incenting Academia (or, how to resist quitting my day job)

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  1. Properly Incenting Academia(or, how to resist quitting my day job) Mike Carey (UC Irvine) Beckman DB Self-Assessment Meeting October 2013

  2. Our Field Has Contracted Metricitis • Then: • What really cool things can I study and build? • How (and when) should I disseminate my results? • How useful does unit of work W seem to be? • What has been the overall impact of X’s work? • Now: • What can I write a paper on? • What (smallest piece of) work will be required? • How different does unit of work W seem to be? • What is X’s (i) paper count or (ii) H-index?

  3. Let’s Look at a Case Study:XML Query Processing • I did some “XML time” in industry (1999-2008) • BEA offered XML-based data integration • Being “ex-research”, my team looked around for useful ideas to borrow and to implement • Lore (Jennifer et al), TIMBER (Jag et al) were very helpful (e.g., query algebras and approaches) • But not so much for the other 1000+ papers on QP inside the world’s biggest single XML document…  (Apologies to anyone I’ve just offended with this caricature of the angle bracket situation … but ….)

  4. Unfortunate Consequences • This has (badly) warped the academic culture • We no longer seem to evaluate impact ourselves • Instead, we count survivors of a reviewing process that many whine about as itself being random & broken (?!?) • We value quantity and (gratuitous) differences over quality or real potential usefulness • Other sciences value refinement and step-wise progress • But we would seem to prefer to keep making new stuff up • This also affects our product (student) pipeline • Impacts what agencies like NSF will fund • Impacts how students think about their primary goal • Discourages doing things that actually take some time • One aspect of which is making sure something is really feasible • Which seems especially dangerous in a smoke-and-mirrors discipline • Hopefully our case of Metricitis is not yet in Stage 4 ….

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