Short papers at conferences: revisited

Revisiting this topic discussed in a previous post:
http://vimsu99.blogspot.com/2008/02/short-papers-at-vision-conferences.html

From talking to some people at CVPR about the possibility of having short papers at vision conferences, I learned a few interesting things. Although not new or for the first time, I am pretending that I was not even thinking about these issues.

Apparently, most of the vision researchers agree that there is no clear distinction between the "oral" papers and "poster" papers; the cut-off is fairly arbitrary and has nothing to do with an analysis of the "quality-curve" of the accepted papers. This phenomena also holds true (to some extent) about the best paper award as there is usually a group of deserving papers and not a clear winner. However best paper award can be left out from this discussion as it still implies a higher percentile over the accepted papers.

The "oral" status has thus artificially been elevated above the "poster" papers. Despite the fact that everybody accepts this case, it is unfortunate (for obvious reasons) that everybody is implicitly giving more importance to orals (through biased promotion and perception, i.e., "he/she got three oral presentations"). So the concern is that if short papers come into existence, there would be an additional synthetic division in the perception of the quality of conference papers.

I disagree with this reasoning because of the following two reasons:

(1) The oral-poster partition is due to the reviewer evaluation and not as authors' projection. In other words, the authors are often the best suited evaluators of their own work, so they should make a preliminary judgment of the possible impact. If they get a very encouraging response at the conference, they can make a journal/extended version with additional details.

(2) An introduction of short papers may perhaps reduce the reviewing time per paper as unnecessary details could be avoided (which are otherwise prevalent to avoid yet another unfortunate perception, "a six- (or fewer) page paper is not worthy of acceptance"), which is an incentive for the authors as well.

Once again these two points are again on the idealist frontier with a clear negligence towards the rat-race of publishing. If that was not the case, there would not have been any problem with the original format, in the first place. It is conceivable that short papers would rather be detrimental to the optimization of the number of publications (once again there would be a difference in the perception of the weights of these types of papers) required for the recipe of survival in current academic environment.