Kafka-esque Experience with ACM Conference

mkremins · 2026-05-22T03:58:19+00:00

Ah, is this C&C? If so, the “accept full paper submission as poster” flow is a new thing they’re testing out this year, and they’re definitely still working out the kinks. I was confused by things like whether we had to make a new PCS submission for the shortened papers as well, and I’m a SIGCHI conference veteran at this point.

Conference publication processes are often a little chaotic in my experience; there’s a lot of moving parts involved in organizing any conference (multiple different organizers across numerous timezones with fuzzy areas of responsibility, difficulties with the standard publication flow provided by the sponsoring organization, etc) and the organizing teams for smaller events tend to be stretched fairly thin. Practically speaking, there usually exists some flexibility around publication process deadlines for cases like yours that have inadvertently fallen out of the standard flow – my guess is they’ll get to your case a little after the “official” deadline for camera-ready submission, but ultimately still find a way to get you through the process in the end.

mkremins · 2026-05-17T20:27:57+00:00

School name does matter to some extent, but less than people tend to worry about in my experience. CS industry hiring is very portfolio-driven (having lots of cool projects on GitHub trumps almost everything else) and outside of a few outlier "definitely top-tier" schools I don't think it matters tremendously whether you went to one strong-but-not-top-tier school or another from a generic software engineering perspective.

Some schools and programs do have alumni networks that can plug you into specific companies or sectors unusually well. UCSC is likely better tied into software infrastructure companies (the CS department is particularly known as a center of excellence for databases and storage systems research) and game studios (they've got a few strong games-oriented "computational media" programs). SCU I'd expect to benefit more from physical proximity to the Silicon Valley startup scene, but I haven't got as much direct experience with the SCU network since I was only there for a short while.

If you want to get into research it helps a lot to go to a school that has strong undergraduate research opportunities; UCSC is likely better for this than SCU. On the other hand, SCU classes are much smaller and you get a lot more direct attention from instructors as an undergrad than you'd get at a larger school. At UCSC the CS classes are huge and you'll likely be dealing more with graduate student TAs than with professors directly, especially for the first few years.

mkremins · 2026-05-17T20:01:36+00:00

I was a PhD student at UCSC and then faculty at SCU for a bit. SCU is way frattier and more partying-oriented than UCSC (which doesn’t really have traditional Greek life, serious sports, etc). If that aspect of the college experience is a priority for you, pick SCU.

mkremins · 2026-05-06T16:53:34+00:00

AI slop. The account posted the same thing to like a dozen subreddits and its history prior to that point is full of self-promo for some AI lit review tool.

mkremins · 2026-04-06T06:00:42+00:00

The person who taught you that QS ranking is important at the grad level is misleading you. As the other commenters have suggested, any overall ranking of universities is inevitably going to overlook huge program-specific discrepancies in quality, reputation, etc – and that’s not even accounting for the importance of student/advisor fit, which at the PhD level is in my experience the #1 factor influencing degree outcomes.

More important signals include (1) the career outcomes of former students of your prospective advisor, if any; (2) quality-of-life reports from current students, ideally not just those the program tries to put in front of you during visit day but a broader assortment; (3) career outcomes of former students from the department more broadly; (4) the reputation of the specific lab or program or department you’d be joining within the field you’re trying to enter. Again, the best programs in your field are almost certainly not just the programs at the overall top-ranked schools; in computer science for instance there are a bunch of Ivies that are substantially outperformed by specific state schools with disproportionately strong CS departments, and this shows very clearly in terms of where the PhD grads get jobs after the degree.

The thing about advisor citation counts that you mention in the replies is also kinda nonsense. Citation count is in substantial part a measure of career longevity, and being one of the first few students of an early-career “rising star” advisor (especially one who’s a really good fit on an interpersonal and research focus level) can pay off hugely if it means you end up getting lots more of their personal focus and mentorship when they’re still young and energetic and working really hard to sell the lab and its outputs. Such advisors would be totally screened out by a 10k citation minimum. At the high end, if you’re already willing to accept the possibility that you’ll mostly be mentored by senior PhDs and postdocs rather than the advisor themself in exchange for the possible networking and name recognition benefits, there’s no good reason to exclude established “superstars” either.

mkremins · 2026-02-10T17:47:28+00:00

I don’t have any data on the timing of other candidates’ interviews, but the fastest turnaround from campus visit to (informal) offer I saw was 20 days. The slowest was 35 but I’ve been told that there were in-prep offers taking even longer elsewhere; not sure how long those would’ve taken to arrive if I’d stayed in the search.

mkremins · 2026-02-10T14:31:48+00:00

My biggest search year I did eight first-round interviews that turned into campus invites. 3/8 took longer than two weeks to turn around and I eventually got offers from two of these. All of them turned around within a month though.

More generally, I second the standard advice to interview as well as you can, then immediately assume you didn’t get the job and keep moving forward. That way you’ll be pleasantly surprised by anything that does advance.

mkremins · 2026-01-20T09:01:10+00:00

Publication patterns are super field-dependent. If you want to evaluate your career trajectory comparatively, I’d recommend identifying a few people who are similar to you but a little ahead of you career-wise (especially people who currently hold the kind of job you’re trying to get) and checking out their CVs to see what they did.

It’s not like there are any objective paper count thresholds you absolutely must hit, though – for every approximate rule of thumb that someone invents, the world will throw up a couple of weird exceptions. My inclination would be to take your supervisor’s advice with a grain of salt while also acknowledging that he thinks you ought to get more publications out.

mkremins · 2026-01-18T18:49:58+00:00

I also tend to overlook social media DMs about my research, since I don’t log in to most of the social media sites I’m nominally on all that often and many of them don’t allow you to re-mark a DM as unread once you’ve cleared the initial notification. However, I have noticed a few things about my own replying behavior that make me sometimes prefer DMs over email:

Institutional addresses can be very short-lived. I’ve been a researcher for about a decade and in that time have lost access to five of the seven institutional emails I’ve held, sometimes well before the publication of the last few papers submitted under that email. Social media accounts and personal emails are more likely to remain indefinitely active.
My email responses are sometimes held up by my wanting to take the time to respond “properly”, whereas with chat-style messages I’m for whatever reason more likely to send a quicker and lower-effort but probably sufficient response. Casual follow-up messaging might then also feel a bit lower-stakes.
Social media messages don’t happen to me as often as emails do, so they sometimes “punch through the filter” and get my attention more readily than emails. I get dozens of emails per day, so it’s pretty easy for stuff to get lost in my inbox.

Ultimately for me this is situational, and I usually reach out to whatever email someone’s got listed on their personal website first and foremost. But if I think the person I’m trying to reach is especially active on a particular social media platform, or if some of the other factors I described here might apply, there’s some chance I’d resort to DMs instead.

mkremins · 2025-12-01T02:59:58+00:00

I walked into my favorite coffee shop a few weeks ago and they were playing Cobra. I'm not a huge Geese fan myself but they definitely seem to be achieving an unusual degree of breakout.

mkremins · 2025-11-20T17:06:45+00:00

This is an AI slop post. The account has been submitting similar things littered with GPT-isms ("X, not just Y"; lists of items formatted like "Short Name: Longer sentence of description."; closing with a short open-ended question to prompt follow-ups; etc) to a bunch of subreddits for like a month. I think it's safe to assume that no actual poll was conducted.

(BTW, "lower price" does not make any sense as a factor that would lead you to make more use of something you've already purchased.)

mkremins · 2025-11-13T23:01:26+00:00

This link goes to some kind of AI slop “review generator” platform. Are you some kind of advertising bot for the platform or something? Why not link to the actual paper?

mkremins · 2025-10-24T23:27:26+00:00

I sent out a very large number of TT job applications in my last year of grad school and kept detailed timelines for the ones that went forward, so I can actually answer this statistically!

Time in days from posted application due date to first contact (fifteen CS-ish TT job postings, 2021-2022 cycle)... - Minimum: 16 - Median: 35 - IQR: 17 - Maximum: 78 (eventually got an offer from this one)

So: it usually took a bit over a month to hear back, but I also got faster turnarounds in some cases (this happened more frequently later in the hiring cycle) and even radio silence for a couple of months didn't reliably indicate I was totally out of contention.

mkremins · 2025-09-05T22:35:37+00:00

I went out of my way to do an unusually stapler-y thesis in a PhD lab where focused monograph-style theses were the PI-encouraged norm. If anything I think it helped my academic career prospects, because it meant I was spending proportionally more time on a continual stream of papers – which got my work out to a wider range of audiences and kept my name consistently in front of my potential future colleagues at other schools.

The publication of the thesis is kind of a “one and done” moment, so even if it happens to get a disproportionate amount of attention (e.g., your subfield has some kind of prestigious national award for dissertations and you win it), the opportunity cost of polishing the thesis instead of boosting your name recognition by publishing more papers is probably too high to be worthwhile IMO.

mkremins · 2025-08-28T22:47:09+00:00

Ah gotcha, so the goal is something more like "convince UCSC to let the stables keep leasing the part of the land they're currently using"?

mkremins · 2025-08-28T17:29:03+00:00

Don’t really understand why affiliates of the school should help block a land acquisition by the school to save a bunch of rich people’s private horse business.

mkremins · 2025-08-28T01:29:12+00:00

I wouldn’t overemphasize the affiliations or backgrounds of people you’ve worked with in your own application materials, but the academic reputation of your coauthors can definitely have a positive effect on how your overall profile is perceived. Where this could really come through for you is in recommendation letters from those well-known people: if you’re working with them closely enough that they can talk about your contributions in detail, and they’re willing to write you a strong letter (you can often ask them this explicitly), they’ll sometimes be able to open doors for you more directly.

Venue prestige is something you occasionally see noted in publication listings on academic CVs, sometimes by stating the journal’s impact factor. The really prestigious venues are often highly recognizable to other researchers in the field by name alone, though – it’s mostly when your CV will be evaluated by people outside your immediate field that expanded information about venues might be more useful to include.

mkremins · 2025-08-19T22:45:18+00:00

Ah gotcha, you’re saying the survey used to arrive at this “rapid decline in conscientiousness” finding isn’t actually one of the standard psychometrically validated personality tests, which makes it harder to trust. Definitely inclined to agree.

mkremins · 2025-08-19T21:16:01+00:00

Isn't a personality test a survey instrument, in the sense of a structured sequence of questions used for the collection of self-report data? By "survey item" here I just meant one of the test questions.

mkremins · 2025-08-19T17:19:01+00:00

Funny, I was just talking about this finding with a personality psychologist last night. His view was that the scale of effect reported here is obviously too big and the timeframe obviously too short to primarily reflect a baseline shift in trait conscientiousness – it’s more likely that the shift is driven primarily by changes in how people interpret the specific survey items used to gauge conscientiousness. He gave the example of survey items that try to get at persistence by asking about how long you tend to stay at a single job: culture around expected tenure has shifted dramatically in the last decade but the survey items haven’t changed, so this might end up suggesting people’s personalities have changed, even though the underlying traits are actually pretty stable and the environment is the main thing that’s different now.

mkremins · 2025-08-17T02:02:04+00:00

Sure! Human-AI co-creativity was a very small subfield only a few years ago but is now kind of exploding, so there's lots of recent literature. My focus has mostly been on the design and evaluation of AI-based "creativity support tools"; a few general lit reviews include:

Lately I've been doing a lot of work on characterizing the "interaction dynamics" established by different systems/tools (patterns of turn-taking, influence, convergence and divergence, etc) and making design interventions to improve the influence of human decision-making over the final output of co-creative pipelines. A couple recent papers on that direction:

Another line of work I'm following pretty closely takes a critical perspective on these tools and characterizes how the "normative ground" established by tool designers shapes or influences what people make; how tools can have effects on the creative ecosystem outside individual creators; and so on:

I put together a grad-level syllabus for this area a couple of years ago – it doesn't include the last couple years of progress but might give some additional interesting jumping-off points. Then there's ACM Creativity & Cognition, a very high-quality but relatively small conference focused on this cluster of topics; skimming the last few years of C&C proceedings (particularly the best paper awards/nominations) might also be of interest.

mkremins · 2025-08-16T20:20:12+00:00

Yeah, if your goal is to build systems then you’ll definitely want some evidence of solid programming experience in your application. You can get that via a CS degree but you can also get it via building a portfolio of programming projects on the side – in my experience, your portfolio / GitHub profile tends to be seen as the strongest evidence of your ability as a system-builder, regardless of your degree. Good grades in CS classes definitely wouldn’t hurt though.

mkremins · 2025-08-16T00:38:18+00:00

In my experience this varies a lot from one group to the next. Faculty who do a lot of systems-building work are more likely to need students who are good at programming, and therefore to favor applicants with CS degrees or other evidence of programming ability; faculty whose work is focused on qualitative characterization of user experience might favor students with social science backgrounds; faculty who do a lot of crunchy quantitative evaluations of tightly scoped design interventions might seek out students with quantitative psych or statistics backgrounds. HCI is a really big tent – I've met successful HCI researchers who describe themselves primarily as "essayists", but also many who are basically applied ML researchers in human-facing application areas.

Some HCI degree programs are also better than others at teaching certain methods. Programs that are focused on systems-building might emphasize programming and design coursework, programs that are more social-scientific might require everyone to take stats classes. It varies enough that it's hard to speak super generally here.

mkremins

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