{"id":89,"date":"2004-07-08T15:10:53","date_gmt":"2004-07-08T15:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dtrace.org\/blogs\/bmc\/2004\/07\/08\/whither-usenix-part-ii\/"},"modified":"2004-07-08T15:10:53","modified_gmt":"2004-07-08T15:10:53","slug":"whither-usenix-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/2004\/07\/08\/whither-usenix-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Whither USENIX? (Part II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Werner Vogels<\/a>, a member of the USENIX ’04 Program Committee<\/a>, has written very thoughtful responses<\/a> to some of my observations<\/a>. And it’s clear that Werner and I see the same problem: there is insufficient industrial\/academic cooperation in computer science systems research — and the lack of cooperation is to the detriment of both groups.<\/p>\n

That said, it’s clear that there are some different perspectives as to how to address the problem. A common sentiment that I’m seeing in the comments is that it is up to industry to keep USENIX relevant (in Werner’s words, “industry will need to be more pro-active in making researchers aware of what the problems are that they need to solve”). I don’t entirely agree; in my opinion, the responsibility for keeping USENIX relevant doesn’t lie exclusively with industry — and it doesn’t lie exclusively with academia, either. Rather, the responsibility lies with USENIX itself, for it is the mission of USENIX<\/a> to encourage research with a “practical bias.” As such, it is up to USENIX to assemble a Program Committee that will reflect this mission, and it is up to both<\/i> academia and industry to participate as requested. This means that USENIX cannot simply wait for volunteers from industry to materialize — USENIX must seek out<\/i> people in industry who understand both the academic and the industrial sides of systems research, and they must convince<\/i> these people to work on a Program Committee. Now, I know that this has<\/i> happened in the past — and frankly I thought that the USENIX ’04 Program Committee was a step in the right direction: where USENIX ’03<\/a> had four (of sixteen) members from industry, USENIX ’04 had six (of seventeen). But unfortunately, USENIX ’05<\/a> seems to be a marked decline in industry participation, even from USENIX ’03: the number from industry has dropped back to four (of eighteen). Worse, all four are from industry labs; where both USENIX ’03 and USENIX ’04 had at least one product-oriented member from industry, USENIX ’05 has none.<\/p>\n

Examining these three years of USENIX brings up an interesting question: what has the Program Committee composition looked like over time? That is, is the situation getting better or worse vis a vis industry participation? To answer this question, I looked at the Program Committee composition for the last nine years.<\/p>\n

The results are perhaps well-known, but they were shocking to me:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To me, this trend should be deeply disconcerting: an organization that has dedicated itself to research with a “practical bias” is clearly losing that bias in its flagship conference.<\/p>\n

So what to do? First, we need some recognition from the USENIX side that this is a serious issue, and that it requires substantial corrective action. I believe that the USENIX Board<\/a> should charter a committee that consists of academia and industry (both labs and<\/i> product groups) in roughly equal measure. This committee should hash out some of the misconceptions that each group has of the other, clearly define the problems, develop some long-term (measurable) goals, and make some concrete short- and medium-term recommendations. The deliverable of the committee should be a report summarizing their findings and recommendations — recommendations that the Board should consider but is obviously free to ignore.<\/p>\n

The situation is serious, and there is much work to be done to rectify it — but I am heartened by the amount of thought that Werner has put into this issue. If we can find more like him from both industry and academia, we can<\/i> get the “practical bias” back into USENIX.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Werner Vogels, a member of the USENIX ’04 Program Committee, has written very thoughtful responses to some of my observations. And it’s clear that Werner and I see the same problem: there is insufficient industrial\/academic cooperation in computer science systems research — and the lack of cooperation is to the detriment of both groups. That […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcantrill.dtrace.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}