Billion dollar baby
I would love to see algorithms researchers attack problems (not only longstanding ones but also ones) that are urgent and timely. Beyond the million dollar problems, we may now care about how the US govt (and may be other govts around the world in slow motion) will (may be) buy troubled assets from financial companies for $$$ Billions. The question is to design a suitable auction. Lawrence Ausubel and Peter Cramton are two Economists who have a working paper addressing this problem: check out the pages 1 and 2, and this paper. There are issues here a Computer Scientist can address.
posted by metoo at 6:38 AM
4 Comments:
Headline: Algorithms' researcher discovers solution to financial crisis, submits paper to FOCS, gets rejected because techniques are trivial.
Better to solve the financial crisis than get a FOCS paper. Also, if you submit it to the next STOC, the PC Chair (MM) may be able to appreciate the application and the impact. :)
-- metoo.
Come on! Why do you think that a paper with a "solution to financial crisis" should be blindly accepted to STOC/FOCS or any other CS conference? It's all depend on the CS contribution. If there is none, or it's trivial from CS point of view then the paper shouldn't be accepted.
In the same way, if somebody will solve some DNA sequencing problem which, say, would have huge contribution for the humanity, and the solution is by using a computer and a trivial algorithm that goes through all configuration, then should such a paper be accepted to a prime TCS conference?
Why do you think that a paper with a "solution to financial crisis" should be blindly accepted to STOC/FOCS or any other CS conference?
I'm not arguing for "blindly" accepting the paper. That is your choice of words, not mine.
The quality of a paper is a combination of relevance and technical depth scores. A paper solving the financial crisis or DNA would score so highly in relevance that it should trump a rather small (though not zero) technical depth score.
and the solution is by using a computer and a trivial algorithm that goes through all configuration
If the algorithm was so trivial how come it hadn't been found before? People often confuse "trivial" with "obviously correct once the proper solution has been pointed out". Those two are different beasts.
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