Category Archives: Policy

Gold Open Access publication: Is now the time?

While scientific papers were once available only to those willing to pay expensive fees to journal publishers, papers are now increasingly made available for free, as they enjoy some form of open access (OA)Not all forms of open access are the same, however. While the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee (of which I am the Chair) is generally happy with the OA rights SIGPLAN 1 authors currently enjoy, it may be time to push for even stronger rights. Reasonable people may disagree about the costs and benefits of such rights. As such, we would like your feedback (even if you are not a SIGPLAN member).

Please consider filling out this open access survey. It should take 5-10 minutes.

The remainder of this blog post discusses the issues in more depth. We invite your feedback!

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Filed under Policy, Process, Science, Uncategorized

Carbon Footprint of Conference Travel

Conferences are the heart of the PL research community. The best PL research is published at conferences, following a rigorous peer review process on par or better than the process of high-quality journals. Conferences are also where science gets done. As the respective community gathers to learn about the latest results, its members also network and interact, developing collaborations or carrying on projects that could produce the next breakthroughs. At conferences, students and young professors can rub elbows with luminaries, and researchers can develop problems and exchange ideas with practitioners.

Photo of airplane and sunset

Air travel warms the planet disproportionately

One drawback of conferences (compared to other forms of research publication) is their cost. The monetary cost is obvious: at least one of a paper’s authors must pay to attend the conference, a cost that includes registration, travel, and hotel. Another cost that is less often considered is the environmental cost. In particular, I’m thinking of the impact that travel to/from the conference has on global warming. Most conference attendees travel great distances, and so travel by airplane. But air travel is particularly bad for global warming. So I wondered: what is the cost of conference travel, in terms of carbon footprint?

To get some idea, I decided to estimate the carbon footprint of the PLDI’16 program committee (PC) meeting, held just before and at the same venue as POPL’16. The result directly sheds some light on the carbon footprint of in-person PC meetings, and by treating it as a sample of the PL community overall, sheds light on the carbon footprint of PL conferences. In this blog post I present the results of my analysis and conclude with thoughts about possible actions to mitigate environmental cost.

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Filed under Policy, Process, Science

Rise of the Robots: Review and Reflection

I recently read Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots with the UMD CS faculty book club. The book considers the impact of the growth of information technology (IT) on the human labor market, and how the trend towards greater automation could eventually eliminate a substantial number of jobs. The result could be a radical, and disruptive, reshaping of the global economy.81fncUPB6cL

I would recommend the book. I found it well-written and thought provoking. Ford capably argues from past economic and technology trends and also digs into particular problems, products, and research in order to extrapolate future impact. Of the ten faculty who discussed the book, nine of us (including me) were convinced that future automation will be increasingly disruptive to human labor markets.

While reading the book, I found myself wondering about my own role, and that of my field, in addressing this situation we’ve contributed to. Many computer scientists have high-minded ideals and wish to help society through IT innovation. What can we do to ensure that those ideals are realized, rather than perverted into the dystopian future that Ford is warning us about? Continue reading

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Filed under Algorithms, Book Reviews, Policy, Software engineering
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