South Korea: the Pioneer of Social Networks

Social networks have considerably revolutionized the Internet usage patterns. Some studies have estimated that users now spend more time on social networks than on search engines. The most popular social network services include Twitter and Facebook.

Today I will shed some light on use of social networks in South Korea and their role in what can be termed as the social network revolution.

To the surprise of many readers of my blog South Korea is the pioneer of social networks, although you cannot find widespread use of Facebook in South Korea. In South Korea Twitter and Facebook are dwarfed by the local social networks, the most popular of which is CyWorld by SK Communications. Cyworld social network is used by 78 percent of Koreans with Internet access. The Facebook-style service was a pioneer in social networking, launching way back in 1999 and launching as a mobile service in 2004. SK’s instant messaging service – known as NateOn – is also the most widely used in Korea, and is three times more popular than Microsoft’s Live Messenger. It is a popular myth especially amongst the Pakistanis that the credit for making social networks popular goes to Mark Zuckerberg and the likes whereas the real pioneer is South Korea. Furthermore, South Korea's CyWorld was so popular and unique that its US counterpart by name of CyWorld US was launched in 2006. In Korea social networks are not just a social gathering point; in fact they are a very successful business model and as per my Korean lab mates social networks have been known to the Koreans back from the age of the dial-up Internet.

Korea's example according to me is an example that we Pakistanis can learn from. Back in Pakistan when Facebook was banned after the "Draw Muhammad" fan page controversy some people argued that creation of a local social network is not a workable solution since we need to communicate internationally - that is an argument that in my opinion comes from defeated minds and without knowledge of the science of social networks and their evolution patterns - CyWorld is a forum which international community has joined (yes many foreigners joined CyWorld to interact with Koreans) and learned from leading Korea to earn a respectable place in the world of SNS and mobile services with all this causing international communications to increase. Moreover, the data users share on social networks is a critical asset for any country and should not become a commodity for any other country which is currently the case due to not having any idea of the significance of local social networks.

For all the above-mentioned reasons Korea's case is one that has important lessons for many countries in Asia and in particular Pakistan where anything foreign and in particular by US is considered irreplaceable whereas many other countries of the world are moving in a different direction.

Experience at TEDxKAIST: Happiness for Science and Science for Happiness

Almost all of us know about the TED platform which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it is an annual event where world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to share what they are most passionate about. The TED platform gave birth to an accompanying, new initiative called TEDx and this is a new program that enables local communities such as schools, businesses, libraries, neighborhoods or just groups of friends to organize, design and host their own independent TED-like events. Such an event was organized in KAIST on 11th September, 2010 by some students of KAIST and the team was wonderfully led by Mark Whiting, a Masters student at the Department of Industrial Design, KAIST. They called it TEDxKAIST and it turned out to be an energizing event for the hard-working KAIST students.

KAIST is one of the nation's most prestigious science and technology institutions and keeping this in mind the theme was well-thought: "Happiness for Science and Science for Happiness" - its a significant one as KAIST is all about hard-working students actively engaged in scientific contributions and advancement. There is a famous saying for KAIST students that KAIST never sleeps - the KAISTIANs struggle hard to survive in the seeming paradox of hard work and true happiness. The inspiration for the theme came from this excerpt:

"Of the more highly educated sections of the community, the happiest in the present day are the men of science. Many of the most eminent of them are are emotionally simple, and obtain from their work a satisfaction so profound that they can derive pleasure from eating and even marrying." - Bertrand Russell (1930); The Conquest of Happiness

In this blog post I will share my take aways from TEDxKAIST and some of the key points from the speeches that all people associated with science should keep in mind to become a "happy scientist contributing to a happy world." Following is a brief profile of each of the speakers who spoke in TEDxKAIST and gave their view of a happy scientist:

• Dr. Young Hae Noh who is a Professor at School of Humanities and Social Sciences at KAIST and has also served as dean of multiple departments at KAIST.
• Dr. Minhwa Lee is the Business Ombudsman who makes a link between government and the small and medium businesses; he is also a Professor at KAIST.
• Spanish Koffee, a very famous music group in Korea which pursues free distribution of digital music in their mission of "Passion worth Spreading."
• Dr. Woonseung Yeo is a Professor at Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST and his PhD work at Stanford university includes introduction to the field of sonification which implies transmitting information through audio signals.
• Sungdong Park is the CEO of Satrec Initiative which is the world's leading company in high-performance, cost-effective Earth observation small satellite solutions. He won a Civil Merit Medal, a presidential commandment and an Industrial Service Medal for his contributions to Korean space science and technology.
• Byungwoo Jang is the CEO of LG OTIS and has served LG for many years. He comes from a family of great scholars of English literature.
• Dr. Don Norman is a distinguished visiting Professor at KAIST and holds many other significant positions around the world. His work has resulted in a number of influential books including “The Design of Everyday Things” and most recently “Living With Complexity.”

Professor Noh began her speech with a quote on definition of success by Benjamin Zander, "Success is not about wealth, fame or power; it's about how many shining eyes I have found." She shared her story about her musical classes - a love story but a very different one: a Professor-student love story. She shared her tips on being a successful Professor - a Professor that brings out the talent in her students to the full, that is both loved by the students and loves the students and a Professor that incites passion and enthusiasm in the students which in my opinion is quite lacking in a majority of today's students. She advocated the idea that Professors should give freedom to students by allowing them to discover their potential and greatness in a journey of their own and at the same time Professors should be keen observers of students and should extract joy in discovering interesting features of their students.

It was really interesting to see and actually observe the scientist's definition of happiness: surpassing challenges and overcoming obstacles; sharing and inculcating passion all around is what happiness is from a scientist's point of view and this view came out more clearly in the talk by Sungdong Park. His story was one of courage and bravery, of making the impossible possible despite all hardships and of rising after setbacks. He shared a newspaper cutting which said, ""First Park Sung Dong got mad. Then he got even." Before establishing Satrec Initiative he was the leader in developing advanced small satellites in KAIST for 10 years - but then something happened which eventually led him to the success he enjoys today but the path was not easy. His government lab was laid off; it was a hard time but he did not lose hope and launched a venture with his old lab's technology. His vision was to make all of SATREC's engineers become millionaires - apparently a crazy idea but with passion and devotion Park made this possible and today Satrec is the only private company in Korea that is a member of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and is deploying satellite solutions for Dubai, Malaysia, Singapore and Turkey.

Another talk that inspired me a lot and in which were the things I have always advocated for science and engineering students was the talk of Byungwoo Jan, the main theme of the talk being technology needs art. His talk was about importance of literature for science and engineering students - without literature any student is incomplete for literature is a way to imagine yourself in the position of another person. Today there is lack of feeling of the pain of others which is making the world an insensitive place - one way to overcome this is through literature. The LG OTIS CEO highlighted how reading books makes life more meaningful and transforms individuals - many successful people have literature behind their back. Thomas Edison is reported to have read 3.5 million pages a life and think of all the imagination and creativity he derived from all these books. Abraham Lincoln had an unfortunate childhood, his life was transformed completely after reading the biography of President Washington and he decided to become a President. Reading books and works of literature that today's students of science and engineering do not do nor enjoy much is a very healthy habit for the mind and can be a new source of creativity and inspiration for tomorrow's scientists so they must not give up this habit.

At the end was the talk of Professor Don Norman which was undoubtedly the highlight of the entire event. The thing that was really surprising about this talk was that he did not use any slides, instead he drew all the material he wanted to present on a white board and the talk was inspiring indeed with lots and lots of lessons for people of science and engineering. The talk was fundamentally organized around the following

He first asked the audience about the ones who were happy and ones who were not and then moved on to say that those that said neither happy nor unhappy made a smart choice - because if you're happy then it means you are not doing well in your pursuit in life because on every path happiness comes with a lot and lot of unhappiness; being successful means not going through the normal way but through lots and lots of pain and difficulty. He then explained further about the happiness and sadness - it is just a state which can be measured and when on the path of achieving something one should not worry about being happy; satisfaction and dissatisfaction - it is a judgment which no one can measure except a person himself/herself and optimism and pessimism - these are points of views and this is what determines everything. As an example on point of view he explained the fear that a human feels when asked to walk on a plank placed in mid-air as opposed to no fear when he is asked to walk on the same plank placed on the floor meaning that points of views are driven by a human's emotional system, his approach and instincts and this has to be the driving factor if a scientist is to derive happiness from his science - happiness for both himself and the world.

He related a story about his experience at Apple which shows how a fusion of happiness and anxiety can lead to success in science - his tip was that when thinking about new ideas and when embarking on journey to creativity one must have fun, relax, be in a comfortable state of mind but when decision has been taken on some idea then accomplishment comes through anxiety and a worried state of mind. Lastly his talk threw light on the paradox of urgent problems vs. the important problems - it is the important problems that need to get done first because what you want to do in life is the important thing and that makes the difference.

This event was a great experience and a memorable one during my stay at KAIST and surely the lessons and tips given here will help me throughout my academic life.

Coling 2010 Workshop The People’s Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources

Saturday, 28th August, 2010 was a long and eventful day as I attended a workshop co-located with COLING 2010 in Beijing, China. The workshop was organized by the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab in the Department of Computer Science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. The main theme of the workshop centered around collaboratively constructed semantic resources and their role and influence in Natural Language Processing researches of today. Though this workshop was organized for the second time and had a small community with new faces appearing this time yet the way the discussions were carried out seems to offer much promise for this community.

The following diagram gives a pictorial representation of what the workshop was all about:

Within the natural language processing domain there used to exist what we can call a knowledge acquisition bottleneck; earlier this bottleneck was resolved through development of semantic, lexical resources by experts; WordNet being a typical, classical example. However with the emergence of Web 2.0 the scenario has completely changed and the focus of the NLP community has moved from the classical resources to collaboratively constructed semantic resources (CCSRs); Wikipedia being the most popular example which is why we can now see an increasing number of research publications directed towards such themes in many reputed conferences such as CIKM, WWW, EMNLP etc.

As the diagram above shows the workshop's focus was on researches directed towards use of CCSR's for enhancement and furthering of NLP and also the other way around using NLP to improve CCSR's

The best thing about the workshop was that it welcomed researchers from diverse domains some this time and promising more for the next time; in fact the invited speech by Professor Tat-Seng Chua of National University of Singapore was also from a diverse area namely community-based question answering. Hence the papers presented were from two categories:

• Those using collaboratively constructed resources as sources of lexical semantic information for NLP purposes such as information retrieval, named entity recognition, or keyword extraction
• Those using NLP techniques to improve the resources or extract and analyze different types of lexical semantic information from them.

Overall there were 8 papers presented in the workshop of which 5 were on Wikipedia, 1 on Amazon Mechanical Turk, 1 on translation resources and 1 on the blogosphere.

The paper presentations at the workshop were followed by an extremely interactive and knowledgeable discussion on the theme of the workshop - collaboratively constructed semantic resources. In my opinion everyone amongst the attendees had something to take from the discussion and below I am sharing all the questions raised during the discussion along with the thoughts of the attendees. Readers can chip in their comments/thoughts/suggestions for the mutual benefit of the whole community.

The first question centered around the scope of the workshop's name i.e. whether the scope of name "Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources" was too wide or too narrow. The very first suggestion from the invited speaker Professor Tat-Seng Chua was a very useful one and he suggested using the term Community Based Semantic Resources instead. Two other suggestions suggested the use of the term crowd sourcing or wisdom of the crowds as these are the more popular terms used within this area and workshops co-located with other reputed conferences use these terms. However one of the workshop chairs Dr. Torsten Zesch put forward a valid argument against these two terms: one can find it hard to agree that Wikipedia falls under a crowd sourced resource and as such this term may narrow down the scope of the workshop too much; on the other hand wisdom of the crowds is a very widespread term for Web 2.0 tasks and many other conferences use it but it is too broad a theme keeping in mind that the workshop centers around use of the resources for NLP tasks and using NLP tasks for improving collaboratively constructed semantic resources.

The next question was a very important one as it bridges NLP researches of yesterday and today: what is the relation between expert-made and collaboratively constructed resources; are they complimentary or are they different? Further explanation of this question was provided by the workshop chair Professor Dr. Iryna Gurevych: for many years the NLP community has relied on classical lexical, semantic resources and they have served us well but with Web 2.0 CCSR's are in widespread use so do we still need the classical resources, shall we spend our efforts in improving the classical resources? On this question almost all the attendees were on agreement that the quality and correctness issues in CCSR's have to be addressed for example Wikipedia has some quality and correctness issues and there is very less work on addressing these issues. When compared to classical resources CCSR's are better in terms of coverage and the classical resources are better in terms of quality so the need is to incorporate quality of classical,expert-made resources into CCSR's and for this we need to provide incentives for guiding the crowds who are generating the CCSR's: Mechanical Turk for example has a nice way of ensuring quality through monetary incentives and the research community needs to think of more ways in which to ensure that CCSR's of high-quality are produced.

The third question focused on the various types of CCSR's and their classifications: what are the most valuable collaboratively constructed semantic resources, how can we classify them? The various types of CCSR's mentioned by the attendees were Wikipedia, Twitter and social networks, forums and CQA sites, YouTube, Flickr, Wiki family e.g. Wiktionary, Wikiversity, Wikitravel etc. As for the value of any CCSR the attendees held agreement that coverage and number of people involved in the resource creation are the determining factors. As for the most valuable CCSR's Wikipedia's importance cannot be denied by any means and there is ample evidence to suggest this; for the future of CCSR's Twitter may emerge as an extremely valuable resource as it a whole wealth of knowledge waiting to be mined; moreover Twitter has managed to attract the attention of the research community in a very short span of time and this can be assessed from the amount of research publications using Twitter as a source of data; reputed publication venues such as WWW, CIKM, SIGKDD, COLING etc. now have many papers on Twitter and if the NLP community directs its efforts towards this resource properly then it can be used as a very effective and useful CCSR. As for the classification of CCSR's a well-grounded classification of CCSR's does not exist and this may also be one research problem within this area as classification is a multi-dimensional thing. One significant line of discussion between Wikipedia and Twitter is that in Wikipedia the user's intention is to make a single,useful resource whereas on Twitter people share their thoughts/message separately in a 140-character long tweet implying that the nature of each CCSR is different and it is important to take this factor into account.

The fourth question centered around the impact CCSR's are having: where do CCSR's have the largest impact, do they really make a difference? Everyone agreed that impact of CCSR's is huge as it has solved the knowledge acquisition bottleneck for researchers and data is now a free resources and since free zones empower people hence its worth the effort and exertion of research efforts towards CCSR's will be beneficial in the future as well. People start to think in new ways with new resources and it benefits the whole community: within this direction an important point was raised by one of the attendees that the commercial giants such as search engines may already be using CCSR's for their tasks and this may also be a significant business secret for them. All this implies that CCSR's have a great potential to heavily impact both research and commercial applications and the community needs to think about more and more ways for creation and improvement of such resources: an example being "games for a purpose" which gives people a leisure incentive rather than monetary one for creating the resources and Google's Image Labeler is one such application which Google uses to generate image tags and hence improvement of its image search.

The fifth and last question concerned the different research areas that have interest in CCSR's: which scientific communities have collaboratively constructed semantic resources as their distinct topic, which fields other than Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing/Human Language Technologies should we collaborate with regarding CCSR's? This question has a broad range of answers in my opinion; some answers discussed during the workshop had suggestions to collaborate with people from the social sciences field as "Social Science meets Computer Science" is an emerging, prominent theme recently; moreover people from the computer networking domain can also provide useful insights with respect to CCSR's and hence in the future we may see a broad range of researchers gathering to work collaboratively on collaboratively constructed semantic resources.

The workshop was a great experience for me and I look forward to attending and presenting my work in it in future as well. Readers are advised to drop in any comments/suggestions with respect to collaboratively constructed semantic resources.

Applying for a Masters/PhD Program

I have been receiving many emails from students asking for guidance on the application procedure for Masters/PhD and at the same time many students seem concerned about scholarship.

So today I am writing a post to answer all these questions by the students.

Firstly and most importantly students should know that now Computer Science has turned into a very competitive field with largest number of conferences and yearly publications. It is what you can call a hyper-active field with lots and lots of research around the world. As such the model has now changed and the Masters program in Computer Science around the world now comes in two flavors: Masters by Coursework and Masters by Research, whereas PhD is a pure research-based program.

The difference between the two is that in Masters by Coursework you just have to finish course credits and that's it, you're not part of any lab or you don't have to be Research Associate under any Professor. You can say its just like the Masters program we have back there in Pakistan in universities like FAST-NU (though I have been told that as of now FAST-NU encourages research and a project/thesis is a mandatory part of MS degree requirement). On the other side of the spectrum the Masters by Research program is very much like PhD program and your transition to PhD is much easier if you go for Masters by Research program, you have to do a Masters Thesis and you basically work for a Professor as Research Associate. Your choice of thesis topic is with him and its pure research and quite tough too but yet a great learning experience. Some Masters by Coursework programs such as the Erasmus Mundus Masters program and Masters program in some Swedish universities also has the requirement of a Masters Thesis but the choice of your thesis is entirely upon you and little supervision is given during the thesis for example you don't have to complete a literature survey phase, design phase etc. with any Professor.

Applying to the Masters by Coursework program and getting admitted into it is considerably easy. All you have to do is go to the university website, search for the application instructions for applying to Masters by Coursework program, prepare your documents as per the instructions and send them by airmail. That's it.......you have applied to the Masters by Coursework program. Now you have to wait for admission results of the university to which you have applied.

Now coming to the procedure to apply for MS by Research or a PhD program you have to do the following:

1. First you have to identify your research area and search for universities around the world that have research labs/groups working in those areas. This step has to be conducted really carefully as you are the one who knows your research aptitude and potential areas of your interest. Go through the lab's research work very thoroughly, read some of their important publications and decide on basis of that. There is no point in going for research in Computer Science if you have no aptitude for it or cannot narrow down any specific research area for yourself. Most students from Pakistan just want to get admitted anywhere and for that they even don't bother whether the field interests them or not. In fact some even change their field like they have one research area during Masters and land up in a completely different area during PhD, how could anyone who has love for scientific research not choose the area carefully in the first place. This approach may make you get admitted but is not going to help your career as a scientist if you are willing to become one that is.
   
2. After you have completed step 1 you must have a list of potential universities in which you are interested and the research groups you find appropriate for yourself have to approached now. The way to do this is to approach through Professors, basically co-ordinating with a Professor from your research area before application. The main thing is getting some Professor interested in you joining as a Research Associate in his lab and the process of approaching Professor has to be well thought out. Dig deep into the work of his lab and explain to him clearly why you want to work with him and in what way you think you will contribute towards his research. Read some of his papers and then compose an email for him. That email should also be written after a lot of study and include a web link of your online profile for the Professor; if you do not have an online profile then create one. An online profile is extremely important in this era of competitiveness and more so if you want to do research in the field of Computer Science. It is better not to attach things with your first email as first email to Professor has to be very short and concise. Here are some great advices for prospective research students by a Professor of University of Virginia: advices.
   
3. If after reading your email the Professor thinks you can be productive for his lab he will be ready to take you and agreement of Professor is like 70% of process done.
   
4. For the next step he will ask you to send your application package to the university and will support your application. Professor's support of your application highly boosts your chances of successful admission.

Now coming to scholarship: that varies from country to country and university to university. Many universities of the world have tuition fees exemption for international students and in addition to that they give stipends for living expenses so no you don't have to do a job. This is the case in many Asian countries like Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong,Taiwan etc. and don't think that since these countries are in Asia their universities are not good. In fact these afore-mentioned countries currently have the highest academic publishing rate in the world even more than what is currently in the US......they have some excellent researchers and Professors with a brilliant environment for research. Whereas the case in most European and US universities is that scholarships/funding is not available for Masters students be it Masters by Coursework or Masters by Research and the situation after global economic crisis is even worse so you might have to do a job which may be a great burden for your research work or you may have to arrange for the amount beforehand which also is quite tough. The case for PhD programs is different; PhD students get scholarship by default almost everywhere since PhD implies you are a Research Associate in some lab so the lab is responsible for your funding.

This is about it, I hope students find this helpful. If there are any queries or any sort of help needed you may contact me on my personal email id: arjumandms@kaist.ac.kr or arjumand_younus@yahoo.com

[From SIGIR 2010]: Best Paper on Value of Search Trails in Web Logs

We search daily for information; in fact it would not be wrong to say that search has become an integral part of our life on the Web. However while searching for particular information comes a complex range of interactions which varies for different users and different queries and it is these complex interactions that are recently attracting focus of researchers at Microsoft for their Bing search engine and this was the theme of the best paper in SIGIR 2010 "Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs."

The paper itself is very interesting and again it seems that the focus of future Information Retrieval researches would heavily come from Human Computer Interaction as was also obvious from keynote talk in SIGIR 2010.

What happens when you enter a keyword for searching on Google, Yahoo or Bing: a list of Web pages are returned which are ranked based on their relevance which has been computed for much time with the much-renowned PageRank and now variants of PageRank are used for the purpose. Now what do you do with these results? You either follow the different links one after another and finally set to a page that you find to be most satisfying for your query: the entire set of pages followed have been referred to as search trails by White of Microsoft Research and Huang of Washington University and in this research they have studied the value that users derive from this entire activity through a log-based analysis. The researchers collected logs of URL visits of users who opted to provide this data through a widely distributed browser toolbar; the data was collected over a three-month period from March 2009 to May 2009. Formally a search trail is defined a temporally-ordered sequence of URLs beginning with a search query and ending with either: (1) another query, (2) a period of inactivity of 30 or more minutes or (3) termination of browser instance or tab; the figure explains this more clearly:

In the figure the circle represents query along with search engine result page, rectangles represent web pages that user navigates to from the search engine result page, double vertical lines represent backtracking to an earlier state and back arrow shows that user has requested to see a page earlier in search trail. Example in the figure shows a typical example of a search trail with query Q1 initiating the trail and user navigating to page P2 from the results page, then to page P3 and from page P3 to page P4; page P4 does not satisfy the user so he returns to page P3 which is why page P3 has the double vertical lines and then finally navigates to page P5. In this context page P2 is origin page and P5 is destination page.

Currently search engines provide only the origin page in their results, this research aims to study the value derived from following of links so that in the future search engines may offer more refined results for example showing of full trails directly on search results, query-specific and user-specific search results etc. The findings showed that following search trails provides users with significant additional benefit in terms of coverage, diversity, novelty and utility: there is a lot of value in the trail and hence we may see in future recommendation pages in Bing with an integration between the recommendation systems and search engines.

[From SIGIR 2010]: KeyNote on Refactoring the Search Problem

The largest forum for researchers in the Information Retrieval community "ACM SIGIR" is underway in Geneva, Switzerland and it began yesterday. The best thing about social network platforms of today is that even though you are not in the conference, you are up to date with all the talks , the papers and new innovative ideas being presented and thanks to Twitter and blogosphere much of SIGIR 2010 happenings are coming to me straight and live :)

This year's SIGIR conference has 15 papers from Microsoft Research which clearly shows Microsoft is going to put a lot of effort into IR in the near future and researchers at Microsoft are certainly working hard to make Bing better and better.

Yesterday's keynote speech at SIGIR was presented on refactoring of the search problem in which Gary W Flake of Microsoft Live Labs described and demonstrated Microsoft Pivot.

From what I see it, Pivot seems to be a cross of the aspects of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Information Retrieval. Watch this TED talk for a live demo of Pivot:

Pivot's claim is to get rid of the curse of information overload in this information age by making the user search experience more near to a search rather than simple browsing.........this he said is achieved by taking raw data and combining it with metadata for faceted navigation. The idea seems promising but I find it is more so borrowed from Wolfram Alpha who have already experimented with this type of search engine which they call a computational knowledge engine: http://www.wolframalpha.com

Also some hard challenges in this task involve server-side issues and a question: is this style of search a good model for all kinds of searches? That the future will tell as Microsoft has plans to integrate Pivot technology with their recently released search engine Bing.

I will be blogging more on some key papers and talks in SIGIR...........if you are interested in live updates follow on twitter with hastag #sigir2010, #sigir and #sigir10.

Paper Reviews: A Great Learning Experience

Reading a fairly good, published paper is a very different thing from reading an unpublished paper submitted for a conference. Most papers presented in decent conferences are well organized and reasonably written and those are the only papers you probably have read in classes and for your research. For a task of reviewing as part of program committee, you get to read quite different papers and many of them are poorly written in one way or another. This I realized when I had to do my first paper review task for the papers submitted for the reputed CIKM conference of this year as my Professor is part of the program committee for this conference. The paper review task is assigned to all PhD students of our lab for learning how to write a good paper the premise behind it being that if you can review papers well then you can also write good papers, luckily I was the only MS student who got to do such a paper review job because out of the assigned papers by CIKM one was related to my MS thesis topic.

The review process is a very rigorous one with a whole round of discussions between the students and seniors (PhD and PostDoc students) ; we read each and every paper carefully along with identifying the problem statement in each paper, the related works in the dimension and the solution proposed to solve the problem. We then identify strong and weak points in each paper which is of course the tough part and is the determining criteria whether to accept or reject the paper.

This whole activity although time-consuming and cumbersome offers a lot to learn specially for students like me since you are in shoes of a reviewer who reads papers you submit to conferences. You are reminded of the do's and dont's while submitting your own paper and this is the entire point of this activity. Reading the papers makes you learn how to write a good paper by following some essential guidelines and keeping in mind the mistakes you should not do at all.

Most importantly the effort that goes into the review process of these credible and prestigious conferences is what Computer Science community in Pakistan should learn from..........these days there is a whole "blogging" boom with bloggers considering themselves extremely credible about which I also wrote and criticized few days back. The people who are related to Computer Science back in my home i.e. Pakistan and in other developing countries need to learn that credibility comes from published, reviewed and innovative work. At the end of the day Computer Science is a science and has to be treated like that, the technologists might be good in their respective fields but they lack the expertise needed to make a country prosper in the long run...............scientists are needed to create technologies of the future and this is what matters when it comes to real development of a country.

I wrote a quick post to voice out my concerns for the betterment of Computer Science in developing countries and now back to review job as writing the review is another tough part of the job which I have yet to finish.