This Eagle Feeds On Spam

When I got to Brown, I felt a grand opportunity to reclaim my mailbox from spammers. My Rice email address was all over the Internet, and this was in the era before even decent spam filters. So at Brown, I began to hand out unique addresses (using plus-addressing). At last count I had handed out over 202 distinct addresses, until I ran into too many sites that refused plus-addressing (and I stopped worrying so much about email in the first place).

Well, boy, was that a failure.

Over time, only one email address has ever been abused, and that too, only once. By corporations, that is. On the other hand, one group of spammers has made my mailbox hell by treating each of these addresses as distinct and sending me multiple copies of the same thing. Those spammers would, of course, be the most shameless hustlers of the Internet: academics trying to disseminate conference announcements. (I recently tracked down that the worst abusers are the logic programming community. And there seems to have been some innocent or malicious collusion with ETAPS 2006.)

So it was with some surprise that I recently saw spam addressed to a unique address I created all the way back in February 2004. And I was deeply saddened to see that it's the address I gave to my favorite hotel—the Adler—in one of my favorite cities, Zürich. That's right: a quality, discreet hotel in a city that pride itself on its discretion in a country that makes a living of discretion...sends spam!

For shame, Hotel Adler.

Next, my Swiss bank will be generating gaudy low-initial-interest-rate credit-card offers and selling my account information to florists.

How to Provide Information to a Black Hole

Some years ago I was talking to a visiting scholar who was a faculty member in a foreign country. I asked her why letters from her country seemed to be so uninformative. She pointed out that there, faculty never read letters: they only write them. Even graduate students are admitted purely on the basis of test scores.

The facts were hardly surprising—after all, this is the system I grew up with in India—but after hearing the way she put it, the proverbial bulb lit up. If you never evaluate letters yourself, how would you know what letters should and shouldn't contain? The feedback—admission decisions—is seemingly random, and therefore of little use. [Yes, I know, that isn't the same as a black hole. But admit it, the title got you reading.]

Read on...

Austan Power, or, Internationals Lacking Mystery

Many months ago, when Barack Obama began his presidential run, I was intrigued by his views. Finding relatively little that didn’t require much digging, I did what any sensible person should do in the first place: ignore the candidate and proceed straight to the advisors. After all, I expect most presidents of most countries (with the exception of those played on TV by TV Nobel Laureates...) couldn’t tell apart the GDP from the WTI from a CDO. It’s the bright sparks behind the scenes who make up the ideas and quietly let the leader shamelessly take credit for it (where else is such blatant lifting of ideas not only condoned but the outright norm?).

So I began to peek into Obama’s team. Imagine my surprise when the first two names I encountered were people whom I both respected immensely. The first, for foreign policy, was Samantha Power, the self-proclaimed “genocide chick”, better known as author of the moving and brilliant A Problem From Hell, her account of the genocides of the twentieth century. The second was Austan Goolsbee, an intriguing centrist (at Chicago!) economist who rose to prominence for his proposal to simplify tax reporting. That was enough for me.

Unfortunately, these people are fundamentally academics and think-tankers, not pols. It had to be only a matter of time before their instincts for truth-telling came to the fore...but how! In just a matter of weeks, the very two people who had so reassured me have now become household names in the most undesirable way: Power for calling Hillary Clinton a monster, and Goolsbee for secretly telling the Canadians that the posturing on NAFTA was simply that, a campaign tactic. Underneath the latter, especially, is a fundamental and reassuring truth, but unfortunately truth and politics mix poorly. And the result is that American foreign policy and economics will be the poorer for the distancing of these two talents.

Just Say Slavery

Since I've been doing research related to human subjects (specifically, evaluating user expectations in computer security), I needed to complete Brown's IRB (Institutional Review Board) certification. The certification course and exam is conducted by CITI, an organization that runs these services for a host of institutions. Presumably they charge a reasonable sum for their service.

I think IRB is a valuable practice. Studies with human subjects are fraught with difficulty; it's not so much that even seemingly innocent projects can expose subjects to risks (though they can), so much as the very act of forcing experimenters to think about these issues is valuable, and can help them re-think their study to be less intrusive, risky or harmful. Of course, there is still a slightly surreal air to this kind of training, which is meant to apply to everyone, including those who work with children, with prisoners, the whole lot. But let's just assume that's the common case (even though I don't believe that), so it's important everyone goes through training in all those aspects.

The bigger issue I have is with the kind of reductionist tests that accompany such training. I went into the (on-line) course hoping for an interesting, educational experience; what I got was a quick return to high-school history class, an absurd exercise in rote memorization and the recitation of slogans. Surely this could be tested in an interesting way, even on the Web (more on that in a bit), but you got the sense they weren't even trying.

It reminded me of not only high school history but also of driving tests. Every driving test has a de rigeur question about blood alcohol or about drunk driving penalties (but not—and this is a pet peeve—about the rights of bicyclists). But the answers are not instructive; instead, they're petty. Suppose the penalty for drunk driving is three months in jail; the options are never (1) three days, (2) three months or (3) three years, answers with an order of magnitude difference. They will, instead, be (1) one month, (2) two months, or (3) three months. You, reading the rules, and being the kind of person who is too sensible to drive drunk in the first place, probably thought “Okay, so the penalty is some number of months”, figuring you'd captured the high-order bit; instead you'd only captured the low-order one.

You could design a smart test. You could put people in situations and ask them what course of action they would take. Sometimes, the reasonable course of action would prove to be the wrong one according to the law, and understanding that difference would be instructive. But designing such a test requires the designer to actually understand testing, which is (guess what) a subtle and rare talent. A good tester, for instance, understands that most questions should be meaningful to administer even in an open-book exam. And so on.

Well, the CITI test was a lot like a typical computerized driving test. I had to work very hard at memorizing key phrases on the assumption that they might show up later (and some did). Only one question that I got wrong was actually instructive. And then I got to a question along these lines (actual wording not reproduced, so that the CITI doesn't come after me):

The purpose of SSL is to secure data:

• True
• False

Well, I thought! A question right in my wheelhouse! Here was an eminently debatable proposition...and then I remembered this exchange from one of my favorite Simpsons episode (cribbed from here):

Proctor: What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, economic factors both domestic and inter—
Proctor: Hey, hey... just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

So I played it straight.

And now I'm certified.

Scribd or Cribd?

Scribd is a new document-sharing Web site.

Does that immediately remind you of something? Where did the content for the music-sharing networks come from?

Sure enough, the reason I found Scribd is because I was searching on a phrase, found a hit on Scribd, and realized it was in an uploaded copy of my book. Needless to say I didn't upload it, nor did I authorize it.

You would think the site would take real precautions to validate uploaded content. But they don't seem to (I pretty quickly found other copyrighted content). This has got to be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

What really curdles my cream is Scribd's copyright handling:

Please note that Scribd may, at our discretion, send a copy of such notices to a third-party for publication. As such, your letter (with personal information removed) may be forwarded to Chilling Effects (http://www.chillingeffects.org) for publication.

How's that again? Chilling Effects was created to protect fair use, fan fiction, parodies, and the like. Of course, you might say, some of the people writing Scribd really are nasty or stupid lawyers (I've received such email once—a story for another day). But these are hardly the people who care about Chilling Effects, either.

The Year of Ignorant Living

This is a slightly modified version of an article I originally wrote for Conduit, our departmental newsletter.

Alumni might wonder about the charmed lives faculty lead on sabbatical. To be sure it is tough to return to civilian life, but not for what might seem to be obvious reasons (in fact, I've greatly missed the teaching!). Instead, this year has been terrific for me mainly because of what it's meant: a return to a state of ignorance.

For all our talk that research is an activity of constantly confronting ignorance, that's not what we really do. Research is more typically a man, a plan, canal panama (women sensibly leave absurd canals out of the picture). We may not know what precise result we're going to get—or even trying to get—but in the big picture we don't flail around very much.

I hadn't planned to spend this past year flailing. Now, I regard tenure less as a reward for past activity and more as a recognition of future promise; so the best way to honor it is to do something new, to view the freedom to take risks as an obligation to do so. Anyway, that's the theory; this runs headlong into (a) having established programs of work in place, (b) not knowing how to achieve ignorance (it's easy to decide to not publish papers or write grants, as Kathi and I did, but harder to decide what to do in its place), and (c) terror.

Proceeding with routine, I spent the summer and early fall working closely with Leo Meyerovich, Greg Cooper, Michael Greenberg, and Alex Bromfield on our new programming language, Flapjax. We finally released it formally in the middle of October to quite a bit of press coverage. In less than a year the experience of disseminating Flapjax has coughed up several surprises (press coverage for a programming language?—must be slow news days...), some negative in a curious fashion (as a result of which we've come to think of Flapjax not as a language but as a library), some surprisingly positive (such as its use at Berkeley). Those are all subjects for a different article.

We worked overtime on Flapjax last summer in part to have it out before I began my sabbatical travels. Kathi and I had been planning these trips for ages, carefully synchronizing the places we visited to be of mutual interest (since a sabbatical is also meant to be a time to recharge personally). Even before we left Providence, however, my carefully-laid plans were destroyed by a decision by the Brown administration that demonstrated a staggering lack of wisdom (needless to say, that won't be the subject of a different article). In a way, though, it was strangely liberating: if Brown didn't want me to accomplish what I'd set out to do on sabbatical, then I was free to do other things. So I did.

Our first stop was Edinburgh. Kathi was there to visit Keith Stenning, a cognitive scientist she knew from her work on diagrammatic reasoning, while I was there to visit Phil Wadler, one of the designers of Haskell and a pioneer of many programming language concepts. I was, however, also looking forward to talking to the seemingly dozens of other researchers Edinburgh has in programming languages, verification, and other parts of applied logic and in which Brown is desperately lacking. When it came to picking an office space, Phil told us that, by coincidence, he and Keith had adjacent offices and the one across the hallway from them was empty; would Kathi and I be willing to share it? It's been a long time since I've had an officemate but Kathi and I figured we could (just about) survive each others' company, and this way we could reduce our space footprint on their department.

What we didn't learn, until our first day in Edinburgh, is that our office neighbors in Edinburgh were Keith, Phil...and nobody else. Where I'd envisioned a long hallway with logicians in every direction you look, we were in rooms of a small tenment, whose door was locked to the world at large. Nobody was ever going to find us here, nor were we going to find anybody else! (Phil did arrange for me to have another, exclusive, office in the King's Buildings, but distance from home—more than any anti-royalist tendencies—made me use it only rarely. There I would have been near all those logicians, but still in a bit of an odd corner of the world.)

Geography is destiny, they say, and it couldn't be more true here. Stenning, it transpired, was no longer working actively on visual reasoning per se; instead he was understanding the logical models behind how people reason. His focus, with his collaborator van Lambalgen of Amsterdam, was on the famous Wason experiments in cognitive psychology, which are a kind of card trick that ask the subject to arrive at conclusions and measure how closely they hew to the entailment relation of classical logic; very poorly, it turns out. This has led some to conclude that logic itself is a poor way to study how people reason. (I hear the hallelujah's from Brown's cognitive scientists.) In contrast, Stenning and van Lambalgen, and others, had revisited the issue with much more detailed studies and found that there were parameterized families of logics that perfectly well explained how the subjects reasoned, and furthermore environmental characteristics—such as how the prompts were stated—predicted how people set the parameters.

Well! Kathi and I have been spending a lot of effort on the reasoning that goes into access-control security policies; but we've always known that what we're studying is tool support without reference to the underlying cognitive models. I had been nagged for a while now that properly executing this work demanded an understanding of these human factors, but I had no idea where to start. And now Stenning had accidentally shown us the world we were looking for. Understanding the consequences of this—and learning how to supress the repressed memories of my college psychology coursework experiences—has taken up a great deal of our effort since November, and will become an even stronger focus in the future. (There's one experiment I'd love to report on here, but can't yet. Yet.)

From Edinburgh we went to Oxford and Lausanne for PC meetings, thence to Paris to fly out to India. I've written at length about returning home after such a long time. After India came Australia (for a conference, followed by a personal vacation), about which, too, my notes will eventually show up here—for now, even nine months later, the memories of that continent are too vivid for words. This was the infamous left-right-left-right period of my life.

In late-January I attended a Dagstuhl event on Web programming, in which the main thing I learned is confirmation of my opinion that the Semantic Web folks are hopelessly out of touch with reality (perhaps it's a stealth marketing strategy). I was back in Deutschland ten days later at universities in Berlin (see blog), Tübingen, and Darmstadt, a well as another Dagstuhl, this one on end-user software engineering. Coming as it did after my Damascene conversion to thinking about user-interfaces this was a fantastic opportunity to revel in ignorance and soak up knowledge from the likes of Brad Myers, Mary Shaw, Margaret Burnett, Alan Blackwell, and Stephen Clarke (a UI designer at Microsoft).

In the early spring we visited the programming languages, security, and verification people at Penn, having several enlightening conversations with Insup Lee's group on obligations as a complement to access-control. We were originally due to spend all of spring at UT Austin; given all this other travel, however, we instead made just two very focused trips to UT (which too has a wonderful mix of applied logicians of numerous stripes). UT recently had the wisdom to hire Brown alum William Cook, who is surely one of the smartest and most tasteful researchers in programming languages; only Will can make even a topic like meta-modeling sound interesting. So a week spent primarily with Will and Don Batory was heavenly.

There were other trips scattered around, but the summer was a good time to consolidate and move forward. Usually I spend much of the school year planning for the summer (and hiring students for that purpose), but this year was obviously exceptional. So it was essentially pure luck that I stumbled upon two of the best students I've worked with at Brown, Jacob Baskin and Brendan Hickey, who continue in the tradition of Brown undergrads taking me in new directions (not least of all Brendan, thanks to whom I'm talking to vice-presidents and lawyers). Combined with two students elsewhere whom I'm co-advising, and my current PhD students—Arjun, who has made strong progress on a very interesting security technique, and Jay, who is feeding me doses of the Coq theorem prover when he's not busy getting married (congrats, Jay!)—it's hard not to realize that sabbatical is over and I'm back.

The end of sabbatical doesn't mean I've stopped plumbing the depths of my ignorance. In August, Spike got me excited about graphics for the first time, and I've been programming sporadically in Matlab since. Indeed, for the first time in my life I wrote a one-use, throw-away script that actually used trignometry. This has gotten me interested in research questions related to both the images and Matlab. I can only hope that if I lie down for long enough the feeling will pass.

I've also taken the plunge on a few other fronts:

• I've long been skeptical of blogs, which associate a false temporality to thoughts. Largely pushed by Brown alum and Blogger employee Pete Hopkins, I created this blog anyway. It will be obvious to readers that I don't “get” the medium, treating it as a repository for essays rather than a dumping ground for thoughts; whether that will change, I don't yet know. I felt obliged to use Blogger, but in retrospect I realize I should have used anything but: that would be the way to test whether Pete was merely trying to drive up Blogger usage or whether he actually cared about what I have to say (my bet, like yours, is not on the latter).
• I finally decided to self-publish my programming languages text, and to put it in print using Lulu, who have been impressive. (I actually publish the book in three formats: for-pay paper, for-pay PDF and free PDF. The beauty of self-publishing is that you can perform any outrageous experiment you want!)
• I dove into understanding Creative Commons licensing—something I've put off for far too long—and found that it offered just the right mix of options for my book. So now people who've been excerpting parts of it (a.k.a., “remixing”) can do so legally.
• I've started negotiations with a publisher in India that may result in a low-cost Indian print version, which is the one of the main benefits of a formal publisher I've missed.
• I finally learned to use an image-processing application, so I can stop asking my colleague Spike, and Brown grad Morgan McGuire, how to do what I think they find the equivalent of balancing parentheses (well, for me; I count parens like some sharks count cards).

It's also been a wonderful year personally: from the urban delight that is Edinburgh to the new world being created in real-time in Bangalore, from walking in awe of nature in Australia to biking in Lance's town in Texas, from seeing (from afar) the site of the Burgess Shale to lying on my back on the Scituate Reservoir dam to bask in the Perseids. I've seen, up close and (sometimes) personal, everything from rattlesnakes to kangaroos, from a platypus to both black and grizzly bears. And as my blog's name suggests, cricket hasn't been too far away, from following a good chunk of the World Cup to fulfilling every fan's dream: watching England play Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground, even if that verb is a euphemism for the abject surrender of the Three Lions we witnessed that day. Over up!

Resolving Unanticipated What, Again?

My homies Ducasse, Wuyts, Bergel and Nierstrasz have a paper at the upcoming (2007) OOPSLA entitled User-Changeable Visibility: Resolving Unanticipated Name Clashes in Traits. Their abstract, as listed on the OOPSLA Web site:

A trait is a unit of behaviour that can be composed with other traits and used by classes. Traits are an alternative to multiple inheritance. Conflict resolution of traits, while flexible, does not completely handle accidental method name conflicts: if a trait with method m is composed with another trait defining a different method m then resolving the conflict Mayo prove delicate or infeasible in certain cases. In this paper we present freezeable traits that provide an expressive composition mechanism to support unanticipated method composition conflicts. Our solution introduces private trait methods and lets the class composer change method visibility at composition time (from private to public and vice versa), something which is not possible in mainstream languages. Two class composers Mayo use different composition policies for the same traits. [...]

Thanks to Microsoft Word, perhaps? Or the Web-publishing software?

Arresting Blackboards

One of my friends (who is knowledgeable about this incident, but whose identity I've withheld for evident reasons) recently brought to my attention a disturbing event. I cannot testify to the accuracy of the report seeing as my knowledge of Turkish politics is low and I cannot read any accounts in that language. However, I was able to confirm the facts from another Turkish person, so I have at least some corroboration.

Ali Nesin is the head of mathematics at Istanbul Bilgi University. He apparently produces a popular mathematics magazines that sells thousands of issues while retaining a very respectable level of the mathematics. Ali seems to really love mathematics in its many forms (including computer science). Ali also cobbles together scraps of funds to run an annual math summer school for students and teachers.

Sadly, Ali's summer school has been shut down and he has been charged with several crimes. Irrespective of the merits of the other charges, the one that we should take issue with is this one: “giving education without permission”.

Alexandre Borovik has set up a petition to protest this. His blog has multiple posts about the situation. Be sure to visit the blog and see the photographs of the cordoned-off blackboard (and check out the content on it).

I have heard that one of the principal reasons for persecuting Ali is that he is the son of a left-wing Turkish humorist, Aziz Nesin, and the recent rise of Islamist power in Turkey has given a fillip to forces arrayed against him. Reading the older Nesin's biography, it's easy to see why he might have offended these powers—not that that excuses what has happened. Anyway, I have reliable evidence that Ali Nesin is a good soul who means to spread his love for mathematics.

It's a sad blow against fundamental freedoms in Turkey. In addition, no country can prosper that shuts down volunteer schools that teach group theory.

The Provost Paradox

I was surprised to find myself explaining this phenomenon to multiple people over the past few months, so I'm putting it down here for dissemination and comment. Readers will wonder whether this is a specific reaction to something at Brown; it's not, and out provosts largely seem to be sound eggs.

There's a problem that plagues academic hiring. I'm sure it affects corporate hiring too, though there, the obsession with growth may mean this is considered a feature, not a bug. Still, I trust some B-school professor has given the problem a catchy enough title to write a book around it; I just haven't found it yet.

Provosts are chief academic officers of universities. Their responsibilities range from overseeing academic programs to supervising research activities, and they often control budgets and personnel to both enforce and exhort. At many universities, the president is a fund-raising, public-relations machine, while the provost keeps the academic and research programs running.

The problem is, many provosts are really just presidents-in-waiting. Positions like deanship and provosthood are ideal stepping-stones to presidencies elsewhere, so some provosts—especially those without a deep institutional attachment—are burnishing their vita waiting for the right presidential opening.

As an academic, one administrative attribute you value tremendously is stability. Innovation is terrific (and essential: the very lifeblood of quality academia) when it's driven bottom-up, for all the usual reasons that demand-driven, bottom-up activity works better than policy-driven, top-down decision-making. In some instances, of course, top-down decisions are essential, most crucially when an institution is stuck in a rut and needs shaking-up. In most other circumstances, things get iffy.

The problem is, steady-as-she-goes doesn't cut it in the job market. When you apply for that plum presidency, a cover letter that says, “Was provost for eight years; maintained quality of academic programs, sustained funding levels, ensured no drop in already-high student-satisfaction ratings” just doesn't cut it. That you obtained something in good shape and sustain that level of quality is simply not regarded as sufficient achievement, never mind that it's a tremendously difficult thing to do (indeed, much harder than sprinkling new works about campus).

The problem, I believe, has everything to do with the ubiquitous press release. A statement that says “We hired Ludwig Knickerbocker, who in eight years at Beta State U. didn't screw up anything” is synonymous with ol' Ludwig not being a go-getter; there's no tiger in his tank. Where is the pride in proclaiming such a person as your new president? What alumnus who hasn't donated before is going to start doing so now? Compare that with “created the world's first Institute for Hypodermic Psychoceramics” and you've got the alumni right where you want them.

Of course, nobody really asks Beta State what they think of the Institute. Oh, sure, there are some disgruntled faculty, but that phrase is redundant, and they're probably just upset that they weren't part of the institute's gravy train. The folks on the gravy train are, of course, ecstatic. What are the institute's long-term prospects? What did the creation plan say about evaluation? Were there any metrics? How does it score today? And do those metric make sense? You almost never see that in the press releases.

Of courae, ask any faculty member about the proliferation of Institutes and Programs, and they will respond with weary cynicism. That's because they know that long after the creator has burnished their vita and moved on, the institution will be left holding the bag (and given how conservative academia is, the new entity will never actually close, but rather will slither along in the undergrowth). And yet when they hire someone else's provost to be their president, they propagate the very culture that they, often rightly, deplore.

A Modest Proposal: Paying to Play at Conferences

I am on a program committee that is struggling with an explosion of submissions. There are way more than we expected (or, perhaps, can reasonably handle), and what really blows is that we apparently don't have the money to pay for quality conference paper management services.

In general, conferences have all sorts of problems with paper submissions. Every good conference is familiar with receiving a certain volume—sometimes a disturbingly high volume—of papers that are either too weak or too far off topic. These authors could easily save the program committee members (and themselves) a great deal of effort by just perusing past volumes, which would rapidly help them realize their work does not fit; but there is currently no disincentive in submitting (even the same paper to multiple venues). It's a sorry story all round.

I therefore have a fairly obvious modest proposal: charge each paper a submission fee of USD 10.

Here are various considerations:

Apparent disadvantage: It hurts those who can't afford that sum. However, this amount is absolutely nothing in the face of the other conference costs. Even if you lived around the corner from the venue, and the conference had a one-day registration fee, the cheapest you could do would be a minimum of about USD 250, making the submission fee a 4% overhead. But compared to the more realistic cost of a conference, it adds an overhead of about 0.66%, i.e., nothing.

Advantage: Conferences can use this money to pay for professional services for the submission, review and response phases. (The cynic will say, “But they won't!” But they'll have a harder time justifying why not.)

Advantage: Processing the submissions costs the program committee and administrative staff time and effort, so it seems reasonable to ask the authors to pay for it. (This is no different from college applications, etc.) Right now, they pay only if they get the (presumed) glory of an acceptance; but there is no (direct) cost in trying without success.

Advantage: It reduces the number of irrelevant, off-topic submissions.

Advantage: Some authors create havoc by submitting the same paper multiple times, etc. They'd be a bit more careful if they had to enter a credit card number each time.

Observation: This system appears to not have perverse disincentives. If, for instance, your friendly neighborhood oracle told you you have a 100% chance of acceptance, you undertake no risk at all in paying to submit. Thus, it hurts the best papers the least.

Mitigation of Disadvantages: You could waive the submission cost to select authors to encourage them to apply, just as we do application costs for other activities. Of course, choosing whose costs to waive can get controversial, and even counter-productive. One elegant solution would be to waive it for people whose papers were previously chosen for award nominations and the like, because these are precisely the people whom you want to have submit again (and they're a small enough group that they don't cost you much).

Concern: It may be more difficult to implement this using, say, credit-cards from some parts of the developing world. There are some alternatives we could consider in these cases.

I expect the first response most people will email me will be, “But then we won't have any submissions left!” Anyone so inclined is hereby expected to also explain why that's a problem. (-:

A Wobbly Chair

One of the arguable joys of being a program chair is dealing with unusual requests. I'm co-chairing CC 2007, a conference on Compiler Construction. CC resides within an umbrella called ETAPS, a confederation of conferences that meet every year in Europe. The advantage to working within the ETAPS framework is that ETAPS deals with the administrative details, from venues to publishing, leaving conference chairs to think thoughts of pure intellect.

Sort of.

I was recently contacted by a researcher who is a good friend who works for one of our leading technology corporations. (I will not even hint at their name: once you learn more about their lawyers, you'll see why. A wayward marksman is far more dangerous than a precise one.) He asked for the ``confidentiality policy'' that we follow. He clarified that they ``are filing a patent on parts of the paper'', so the lawyers were asking for the policy.

CC doesn't have a policy, and neither does ETAPS as a whole. It would be rather tricky for CC to have a policy, actually. Recall that ETAPS contracts the publishing? Once a paper is accepted the publisher takes control of the content, and that is done on terms settled by ETAPS. Therefore, any policy that CC did adopt would probably have very limited applicability, and worse, would have the potential to directly contradict the contract signed by ETAPS.

My friend pointed out that both ACM and IEEE did have such a policy and pointed me to the policy of ACM SIGSOFT. It makes fun reading from this perspective. Note all the things it says about confidentiality: First, it describes a meta-rule. Then it discusses the confidentiality of reviews (but not of papers). Then it discusses the confidentiality of discussion (but not of papers). Then it provides a delegation obligation, but still doesn't say anything about papers. Then it makes a statement about access control, but not about confidentiality. And finally, it specifically addresses to papers. To wit: "Neither SIGSOFT nor ACM guarantee the confidentiality of the submitted manuscripts".

This is the confidentiality policy that so satisfied the company's lawyers.

It's also worth noting the duration we're talking about. CC submissions are due mid-October. The decisions return early December, and final papers are due early January. This means the lawyers were trying to protect a window of not even three months. Of course, when it comes to the law even a day can matter, but that begs the question: if this patent mattered so much, why risk exposure of this content at all?

Given the number of conferences we have these days, chairs are, I think, expected to be utterly solicitous, cloying sycophants who will do anything for a submission. I couldn't resist. I told my friend that (a) we offered precisely the same confidentiality guarantee as SIGSOFT does, so it ought to please his lawyers, and (b) there was an extraordinarily simple and obvious way of protecting the confidentiality of the paper's content....