Reversing the Fossilization of Computer Science Conferences

Summary

Computer science research famously distinguishes itself from other fields by the prevalent role of conferences as a publication venue rather than just a meeting opportunity. For two decades, academics have been discussing this phenomenon, usually to lament it. Top conferences have tweaked their selection mechanisms by introducing such features as multi-cycle reviews and journal-first publication, which have not fundamentally altered the picture. For better or worse, conferences remain the first choice for first publication of new research. Why not, after all? What counts is not the medium, but whether the publication culture fosters innovation. Conferences as they exist do not entirely succeed in that role. People attending the main conferences in each subfield of the discipline increasingly complain of the banality of many contributions (theirs excluded, of course). A number of important papers of recent years were not published in traditional academic conferences (such as those organized by ACM or IEEE or with Springer proceedings), but just released; two examples are the original bitcoin paper by Nakamoto (which many people have observed would never had passed refereeing in an academic conference on distributed systems) and the paper Attention is All You Need, which introduced the “transformer” technique at the core of the current LLM boom. What threatens to make conferences irrelevant is a specific case of the general phenomenon of bureaucratization of science. Some of the bureaucratization process is inevitable: research no longer involves a few thousand elite members in a dozen countries (as it did before the mid-1900s), but is a global academic and industry business drawing in enormous amounts of money and millions of players for whom a publication is not just an opportunity to share their latest results, but a career step. This context does not, however, justify what computer science conferences have become. In principle, a scientific conference is a meeting...