What Makes a Graphics Systems Paper Beautiful

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/notes/systemspaper/

by wcrichton • 7 years ago

147 6 7 years ago

graphics.stanford.edu

markwhiting• 7 years ago

I really appreciate these kinds of things because I think they help fields move forward in some cases.

Does anyone know of good ones for HCI papers?

theon144• 7 years ago

I was wondering how SIGGRAPH's "sexiness" paper criterion played out with all consequences, but never really sat down and looked into it, being satisfied with all the highlights and cool results.

Rejecting "systems papers" despite being valuable and novel definitely seems like an oversight this could produce. As "flashiness" is a key part of SIGGRAPH, I'm wondering whether there could be an alternative conference, or maybe a subconference that's as competitive/prestigious but is a bit more friendly to stuff like graphics systems?

boulos3• 7 years ago

Actually, that was one of the goals of High Performance Graphics. We explicitly merged the low brow Ray Tracing Symposium and Graphics Hardware, precisely so we could publish and discuss interesting systems-ey things that move the world forward but often aren't really broad or sexy enough for a general SIGGRAPH audience. I don't think there's a great way for it to be considered equally prestigious, but as an author you know (for better or for worse) that you'll have more sympathetic readership.

zimpenfish• 7 years ago

I read the title as "(Graphics Systems) (Paper Beautiful)" and was expecting something by Tufte or Knuth.

In retrospect, the plural on system should have collapsed that to "(Graphics) (Systems Paper) (Beautiful)" but I clearly wasn't awake enough.

boulos3• 7 years ago

Will (or the title submission adjustment system) removed the parenthetical around (Graphics) which would have been more clear.

boulos3• 7 years ago

Disclosure: Kayvon and I were office mates, and I've supported his research while at Google (and the wchrichton's research as well).

Amusingly, most of the papers highlighted come from industry experience / application. Part of this is self selection (Kayvon knows these people and these papers). But I believe an unstated component is one of the challenge of academic systems research: access to the seriously interesting challenges. Thus isn't specific to graphics, as many of my favorite papers from ISCA, NSDI, etc. are also industry-led backwards looking systems papers (though many, if not most, of the authors previously went to grad school).

Industry/Academia partnerships often produce the best systems work, precisely because industry can offer the challenge, while academics can step back and see how they might solve the problem completely differently. The natural tendency in most companies is to keep stringing along some small improvements that last you another six months. While it's true that every once in a while, someone does a big rewrite, they are often rare and for good reason. My favorite example came from a talk Jeff Dean gave at Stanford, where he explained you should design a system to scale 10x but not 100x, because by then it should be redone.

What Makes a Graphics Systems Paper Beautiful

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