Special Interest Group on CRAP

Much has been written about the PageRank algorithm that can be used to calculate a static ranking on world wide web pages. The principle that makes it useful is that when someone links to a document on the web, they are implicitly conveying a positive impression of the page. I’ve come to the [...]

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Having been on many program committees in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a worst paper award in addition to a best paper award. Let’s think about this - if a conference has a 10% acceptance rate, it doesn’t mean that these 10% papers are necessarily important papers. It [...]

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If you search Yahoo for the Journal of Craptology, they silently apply their spell correction to give the wrong result (namely the Journal of Cryptology). Sometimes we can be too clever for our own good in trying to produce recull and precision.

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You’re probably wondering what SIGCRAP is. It’s not a special interest group of ACM. It’s a play on words that was motivated by my recent thoughts on the nature of academic publishing, and the role of professional societies.
I’m a researcher in computer science, and I’ve been a member of several professional societies during my [...]

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