We report here on an outbreak in Pittsburgh of the major-conference publication-counting beauty contests that have plagued the state of Wisconsin recently (see recent posts concerning SOSP/OSDI and ISCA).
CMU faculty member David Anderson has tallied an informal “Hall of Fame” consisting of the authors with 5 or more papers in NSDI, the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. The list has 34 researchers, including UW CSE faculty members Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson, David Wetherall, and Steve Gribble, and UW CSE Ph.D. alums Albert Greenberg, Ratul Mahajan, Emin Gün Sirer, Geoff Voelker, Alec Wolman, and Stefan Saroiu (plus Amin Vahdat, for whom we split credit with Berkeley).
UW CSE Ph.D. alum Mike Piatek comments on Anderson’s post: “The sudden burst of paper counting lately does not help to defuse the notion that people are evaluated on the basis of counting papers … For junior researchers, the implied message is clear, and it might not be the message you want to send.”
We agree, but we’re reporting this anyway, because bogus or not, “We’re #1.”