Skip to content
Hallway
0:00 / 0:00

#michaelstonebraker#databaseresearch#academicpublishing

Donald B. Gillies Lecture: Dr. Michael Stonebraker

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

1.3K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2018 to 2024.
  • Presented by Michael Stonebraker, Turing Award winner
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

13K views8 years ago2 recommendations

Databases and dataCareers and interviewsDatabase internalsThe tech industry

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker discusses the widening gap between academic database research and real-world industry problems, criticizing current publishing incentives.

As part of the Illinois Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series, ACM A.M. Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker will give the 2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers frequently reference this talk when discussing the misaligned incentives of modern academic computer science research and publishing.

mpweiheron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Experience report: It will never work in theory”

Yes, this is a development that has happened over time and has become pretty severe. Michael Stonebraker has written/talked about this in the context of DBMS research, but to me the same issues are applicable to other fields as well. Slides: link Talk: link to this video In short, the incentives/requirements in academia have changed so that producing working software is no longer feasible. He says he got his PhD with exactly 0 publications, became a professor with 5. Nowadays, you have to have 5 publications to get your PhD and god knows how many to become professor. That means 1 paper successfully published per year if you want to get your PhD in 5 years. Doing software is not possible, it is too ri…
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Recommends

On “How did software get so reliable without proof? (1996) [pdf]”

…to other disciplines. Anyway, I think it is actually wrong to pin academia's irrelevance to this fundamental divide. The problems in industry aren't too easy / boring to be of interest to academics. They are too hard to be solvable by anyone with the current insane level of publication requirements. Michael Stonebraker talked about this in detail: link to this video It's a great talk.…
View on Hacker News

psychomugson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research”

I often go back to this talk from Michael Stonebraker about, in his terms, the diarrhea of papers 1. It's difficult to justify time towards anything that doesn't lead to a near-term publication or another line on your CV. 1 link to this video
View on Hacker News

ignoramouson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Architecture of a Database System (2007) [pdf]”

Yes. And this paper by Stonebreaker et al was the catalyst for that kind of thinking: link and his presentation: link to this video Also, see this blog post: link
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “A one word change to the C standard to make undefined behavior sane again”

…eased to align with what is good for most compiler users . The reasons for this are complex, but one huge one is that we all generally don't pay for compilers any longer, at least not directly. If you have paying customers, you don't pull stunts like that. Michael Stonebraker talked about a very similar phenomenon in database systems and research: link to this video The observation I found particularly interesting is that the few commercial companies that still interact with research, and I think the same goes for compiler/optimizer engineering, are the "whales", companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Their needs are very different from most everyone else who doesn't run datacenter wher…
View on Hacker News

snakyon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Academia is fucked-up. So why isn’t anyone doing something about it? (2017)”

Michael Stonebraker (INGRES, Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB, SciDB - Turing Award winner for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems - got a PhD in 1971 with zero publications, tenure from Berkeley in 1976 with 5) about the same problem, link to this video
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C”

…whales" as Stonebraker described them, lamenting a similar situation in databases. Their needs are almost completely different from the rest of us! For Google, a 0.1% performance improvement in one of their key applications is worth quite a bit of extra pain for their own developers, and pretty much an infinite amount of pain for other developers. link to this video…
View on Hacker News

dalbasalon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Please commit more blatant academic fraud”

…ommittees, grant makers and such. Are they all the same? Michael Stonebraker^ suggests that tenure committees accept a limited number of papers on a resume. This is to encourage lower volume, higher quality publication. What stops some tenure committees from implementing such changes. I just don't understand what's locking everything into place. ^ link to this video…
View on Hacker News

szarnyasgon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Please commit more blatant academic fraud”

Was it Mike Stonebraker's talk "My 10 Fears about the Future of the DBMS Field"? (2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois): link to this video
View on Hacker News

PeterisPon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate”

Working in research, I do see a clear business value that Elsevier&co are providing and why they continue to get their money. It's acting as an impartial rating/filtering service for the non-scientist administrators. In essence, the funding agencies want a way to evaluate scientists and institutions without asking their scientists and institutions to do so, probably because they don't trust them, and also because they have very strong incentives to avoid making any subjective judgment themselves but instead defer to some "objective" outside source - so they use paper counts published in "proper places" or the existence of papers published in "very good places" as the evaluation metric to cir…
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Negative incentives in academic research”

It goes beyond grants and extrinsic motivation...well maybe the latter category is pretty much all-encompassing. Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker talked about this at length here: link to this video Some points: - Original (risky) research is detrimental and likely fatal to a career in science - Actually creating systems doubly so
View on Hacker News

mpweiheron Hacker News • Mentions

On “A love letter to Objective-C”

> I often fall into the thinking of top 10 or 20 appstore app terms You're not the only one. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of (particularly, but not exclusively) compiler work is driven by these edge cases. As an example, when I look a the justifications for pushing undefined behavior exploitation in C, invariably some Very Smart Compiler Guy™ will state with great authority that this is absolutely essential and completely unavoidable. When you check more closely, it turns out that it enables a somewhat obscure optimisation that at best most people can do without and at worst is just about completely useless. See Proebsting's Law, which was unduly optimistic, and also some of the w…
View on Hacker News