Taken for Granted

I’m at ESWeek in Atlanta this week, and yesterday, as part of the CODES+ISSS sub-conference within ESWeek, Frank Vahid of University of California at Riverside gave a very interesting talk on “Highly-Cited Ideas in System Codesign and Synthesis”, based on a paper written by Frank and Tony Givargis of UC Irvine.  The paper is available here and the slides of the talk here.

L.S. Lowry, “Lancashire Fair, Good Friday, Daisy Nook” (1946)

The work looked at the top-cited papers from the CODES, ISSS and CODES+ISSS workshops/conferences from 1996 to 2007, ignoring self-citations, and looked both at citations in general and within the CODES+ISSS community.   The main purpose was to come up with a measure of the impact of the work reported on in CODES+ISSS over the years.  There were a number of limitations with the methodology, including the fact that the community in codesign and system synthesis also publishes work in other forums such as DAC and DATE, but Frank fully acknowledged that this was a first stab at creating this kind of information and that many things could be improved.  Perhaps others will follow with additional analyses.  After showing the general results, Frank went through the “Top 6″ CODES+ISSS papers in terms of citations and the kind of impact they had and why.  Please check the slides and paper for more information on them.

This was very interesting, but even more interesting were the questions raised by Frank in his conclusions and the questions and discussion after the talk, which went on for some time.  A lot of these relate to the idea of building a tighter knit community in these fields - creating and using common benchmarks and frameworks, improving links to industry (one I always support!), improving recognition and citing of the most seminal work, posting examples, tools and code to allow more testing and improvement of each others ideas, and more.   Although a somewhat unusual paper to see at a technical conference, this one was different, extremely interesting, drew a large crowd (the room was packed with standees at the back) and provoked a lot of discussion.  Well worth a look - see the references above!