[hpc-announce] Call for Papers - Special Session: "Insights from Negative Results" (@ SAMOS XXI)

Mon Feb 22 05:27:08 CST 2021

# Call for Papers - Special Session: "Insights from Negative Results"
#
# Part of the 21st International Conference on embedded computer Systems:
#            Architectures, MOdeling and Simulation (SAMOS XXI)
#                  Pythagorion, Samos Island, Greece (*)
#                          July 4 - 8, 2021
#
#                    www.samos-conference.com<http://www.samos-conference.com>
# *************************************************************
# (*) The organizing committee is closely monitoring the situation
# with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Health and safety are a
# primary concern to us and no unnecessary risks will be imposed
# on authors.
# *************************************************************

## Co-Organizers
* Karol Desnos (IETR, France),
* Shuvra Bhattacharyya (University of Maryland, College Park, USA & IETR, France)

## Motivation:
Frequently, researchers choose to develop an idea because early or theoretical results seem promising. When scaling up, or when implementing the idea in a realistic scenario, the results are not as good as expected. Unfortunately, publishing such results is very difficult, because the reviewing process generally promotes positive results. When such a scenario occurs, scientists sometimes try to publish the idea anyway, by "disguising" the results in a positive way: by deliberately overlooking negative aspects of their results or by choosing an unusual evaluation metric.

## Session objective:
The special session is dedicated to the presentation of ideas that lead to negative results. Contributions are expected to present the original idea, to explain why this idea was expected to provide good results, to present how and why it failed, and to discuss the presence (or absence) of solutions to solve encountered issues.

The objectives of this special session are fourfold:
- To give credit to the research process that lead to the negative result.
- To avoid disguising a negative result into a good one, which may trick other researchers into implementing an idea only to realize its actual negative side-effects later.
- To help prevent other researchers from trying to develop this idea. If the idea seemed good at first, other researcher may have it one day. By publishing the idea and its unexpected negative results, you may save some time for other researchers.
- To promote good ideas behind the negative results. Some ideas producing negative results may need some adapting or fine tuning before they can achieve their potential. A negative results forum provides a way to disseminate these kinds of ideas so they don't just get buried.

## Previous edition
This is the third edition of a SAMOS special session devoted to interesting negative results. The first edition was part of SAMOS 2018. As examples of previous papers under this theme, two selected papers from the first edition can be found at the following links:

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.00217<https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F1807.00217&data=04%7C01%7Ca.d.pimentel%40uva.nl%7Cf68bd6fbb9c4400553cd08d8d71abc92%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C1%7C0%7C637495857125457483%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=barepB%2FMupor0g2%2FSo4%2FLdjlvhaOihWSMz%2BGzntUd18%3D&reserved=0> (The Challenge of Multi-Operand Adders in CNNs on FPGAs: How not to solve it!)
2. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02055464/document<https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhal.archives-ouvertes.fr%2Fhal-02055464%2Fdocument&data=04%7C01%7Ca.d.pimentel%40uva.nl%7Cf68bd6fbb9c4400553cd08d8d71abc92%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C1%7C0%7C637495857125457483%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=czQ9YHcKPx7ZtivNhipQQMz13DLI9%2BsMqhJhPg7JWZc%3D&reserved=0> (Evaluation of Approximate Operators Case Study: Sobel Filter Application Executed On An Approximate RISC-V Platform)

## Paper evaluation guidelines:
The two most important criteria to evaluate such a paper are:

* **Were there good (scientific) reasons supporting the original idea presented in the paper?**
  For the paper to be scientifically interesting, the authors should justify what lead them to believe that the original idea would provide good results. This can be justified either from a theoretical analysis of this idea, or from "small" scale experiments. If the original idea was simply based on a hunch of the authors, then the negative results are not really surprising, and the paper would not be very interesting.
* **Were the negative results "unexpected"?**
  For the paper to be interesting, the negative results should ideally come from implementation/scalability issues difficult to foresee on the theoretical/small scale level.

Then, secondary evaluation criteria are similar to the ones classically used to evaluate a paper :
* Writing style
* Technical/scientific soundness & reproducibility of the content
* Sufficient references to related work

## Guidelines and Deadlines
All submission guidelines, templates, and deadlines will be made available on http://samos-conference.com/<https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsamos-conference.com%2F&data=04%7C01%7Ca.d.pimentel%40uva.nl%7Cf68bd6fbb9c4400553cd08d8d71abc92%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C1%7C0%7C637495857125467489%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=P6mKN9SPK%2F27I0VBfT8qW%2BUFeqF8G4fyBs58y4pN9xA%3D&reserved=0>

----
Andy D. Pimentel
Professor of Computer Science
Parallel Computing Systems group
University of Amsterdam

Science Park 904, 1098 XH  Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel. +31 (0)20 5257578
Email: A.D.Pimentel at uva.nl<mailto:A.D.Pimentel at uva.nl>
http://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/a.d.pimentel/