Three Goals to Accomplish by Writing Papers Xiaodong Zhang Ohio State University This is the last talk before the lunch, I will be quick. Since this is a PI meeting, I concentrate on the motivation, what we have done, and what we are dong, and what we plan to do next. The theme of our NSF project is to balance the source supply and demand of CPU cycles, memory bandwidths, I/O bandwiths, memory capacity, disk capacity, and the latency time.

Purposes of Scientific Research Discoveries New understanding and creating new knowledge Formulating new problems Innovations Solutions (algorithms, methodologies, models, et. al) Open source software Well documented papers for community and society Easy to understand, clear information flow Presentations (conferences/seminar), and discussions “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life”. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) The major resources we are concerned in computer and distributed systems are:

How is Research Measured? Research Production is Typically Measured by Publications in refereed conferences and journals Software and prototypes Invited lectures Patents Research Awards and honors Input of Research Research proposal writing, and research project planning Research grants Recruiting and forming teams. The major resources we are concerned in computer and distributed systems are:

Objective 1: Get Your Papers Read by Peers Why publish in top venues? Each field has its own flagship and leading conferences/journals defined by reputations Most researchers only read papers there. Conferences versus Journals In certain fields, such as systems, architecture, networking, and databases, top conference papers are prestigious, highly visible, with 4-5 or more reviews in depth, and low acceptance rate. SCI and EI should NOT be used as a guidance An SCI/EI entry does not necessarily reflect its quality in the field The quality should be judged by the peers in the field. The impact factor sometimes is field-size dependent. The major resources we are concerned in computer and distributed systems are:

Objective 2: Influencing the Field Identifying significant problems and critical issues Fundamental problems with large application scope. Emerging areas demanding new solutions. Conducting research on focused topics in depth Making names behind some important results. Citations to the paper is an indicator Many follow-ups. Examples of influential results from Ph.D. research: “Small talk” for object-oriented programming (Ph.D.’69, Utah) Co-scheduling in distributed systems (ICDCS’81) Contention-free synchronization locks (ACM TOCS, 91) The major resources we are concerned in computer and distributed systems are:

Objective 3: Transformation to the Society Transferring to new technology Results create new areas in industries Adopted as critical components in products. Significantly improve the quality of existing systems Opening new business opportunities Transferred technology is commercialized in market. Examples of influential results from PhD. work: RAID (SIGMOD’88): a $10+ billion storage market A search engine prototype (WWW’98): Google Results in systems papers adopted in Linux kernels Results in arch. papers adopted in new processor designs The major resources we are concerned in computer and distributed systems are: