arXiv subjects

Eitan Frachtenberg

Publications and source records attributed to Eitan Frachtenberg.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Citation Analysis of Computer Systems Papers

Citation analysis is used extensively in the bibliometrics literature to assess the impact of individual works, researchers, institutions, and even entire fields of study. In this paper, we analyze citations in one large and influential field within computer science, namely computer systems. Using citation data from a cross-sectional sample of 2,088 papers in 50 systems conferences from 2017, we examine four research questions: overall distribution of systems citations; their evolution over time; the differences between databases (Google Scholar and Scopus) for systems papers, and; the characteristics of self-citations in the field. We find that only 1.5% of papers remain uncited after five years, while 12.8% accrued at least 100 citations, both statistics comparing favorably to many other scientific fields. The most cited subfields and conference areas within systems were security, databases, and computer architecture. Most papers achieved their first citation within a year from publication, and the median citation count continued to grow at an almost linear rate over five years, with only a few papers peaking before that. We also find that early citations could be linked to papers with a freely available preprint, or may be primarily composed of self-citations. The ratio of self-citations to total citations starts relatively high for most papers but appears to stabilize by 12--18 months, at which point highly cited papers revert to predominately external citations. Past self-citation count (taken from each paper's reference list) appears to bear little if any relationship with the future self-citation count of each paper. The choice of citation database also makes little difference in relative citation comparisons, despite marked differences in absolute counts.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2022

Underrepresentation of women in computer systems research

The gender gap in computer science (CS) research is a well-studied problem, with an estimated ratio of 15%--30% women researchers. However, far less is known about gender representation in specific fields within CS. Here, we investigate the gender gap in one large field, computer systems. To this end, we combined data from 53 leading systems conferences with external demographic and bibliometric data to evaluate the ratio of women authors and the factors that might affect this ratio. Our main findings are that women represent only about 10% of systems researchers, and that this ratio is not associated with various conference factors such as size, prestige, double-blind reviewing, and inclusivity policies. Author research experience also does not significantly affect this ratio, although author country and work sector do. The 10% ratio of women authors is significantly lower than that of CS as a whole. Our findings suggest that focusing on inclusivity policies alone cannot address this large gap. Increasing women's participation in systems research will require addressing the systemic causes of their exclusion, which are even more pronounced in systems than in the rest of CS.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2020

Revisiting Locality in Binary-Integer Representations

Mutation and recombination operators play a key role in determining the speed and quality of Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms (GEAs). Prior work has analyzed the effects of these operators on genotypic variation, often using locality metrics that measure the sensitivity and stability of genotype-phenotype representations to these operators. In this paper, we focus on an important subset of representations, namely nonredundant bitstring-to-integer representations, and analyze them through the lens of Rothlauf's widely used locality metrics. We first define locality metrics equivalent to Rothlauf's that are tailored to our domain: the \textit{point locality} for single-bit mutation and \textit{general locality} for recombination. With these definitions, we derive tight bounds and a closed form expected value for point locality. For general locality we show that it is asymptotically equivalent across all representations and operators. We also recreate three established GEA experiments to understand the predictive power of point locality on GEA performance, focusing on two popular and often juxtaposed representations: standard binary and binary reflected Gray. We show that standard binary has provably no worse locality than any Gray encoding, including binary reflected Gray. We discuss this result in the context of previous studies that found binary reflected Gray to outperform standard binary, and we argue that locality cannot be the explanation for strong performance. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that weak point locality representations can be beneficial to performance in the exploration phase of the GEA, while strong point locality representations are more beneficial in the exploitation phase.

cs.NE↗