Joe Hellerstein invited Jignesh Patel and me to organize a panel on scientific databases at ICDE this year, which we did. This turned out to be one of the highlights of my semester. While organizing it, Jignesh steered the theme toward the social and community aspects of scientific databases and developed the theme “Scientific Data Mangamenet: An Orphan in the Database Community” and indeed it is an orphan. The panel description is here Panel #2 Panelists were:
I need to get their slides.
I walked off of the beach into the room and there were approx. 14 chairs around a table and I thought to myself “you must be kidding me!” I did how much work for 14 chairs - 4 panelists = 10 people. No way! So I asked for more chairs. Well, we filled the room with 60-70 folks and it was lively. Half the rooom shouted BULLSHIT! to Miron at one point.
Jignesh kicked us off with a statistical analysis of ICDE/VLDB/SIGMOD papers showing that one is 4 times more likely to get a SkyLine paper than a Scientific Data Management paper.
The panel is probably best described via some of the notable disagreements.
Some of the panel members (Yannis) recommended that scientists interested in interdisciplinary work should wait until after tenure. This idea was rejected by others (Miron) stating that //"6 or 7 years is too long to wait."// While I agree with Miron, Yannis' statement resembles the truth in that much of the best interdisciplinary CS work is done after tenure when scientists. Tenure may provide the liberation and independence that encourages the risky strategy and extreme time investment of scientific DB work.
It was asserted that PostDocs were a good time to expand one's research skills, perhaps taking a PostDoc in a different field that a PhD. Miron cited his son who went from wet work to computer (simulation?) in chemistry. I chimed in saying that PostDocs seem to be short and narrow as a transition to faculty jobs. Susan disagreed pointing out that at UPENN they have longer term interdisciplinary postdocs specifically to address this need. Jignesh got my back saying that most PostDocs seem to say in the same "research silo". Conclusion...we need to recast the role of PostDocs.
A good time was had by all. Nancy (my wife) snuck in the back (without a badge) to watch. Her thought was that the whole panel was delightful uncivil and confrontational. She loved this in that she is tired of watching people kowtow and pretend to be nice. In all, the disagreements were charming and love-spirited (that's the opposite of mean-spirited right?)
Discussion