Rewarding influence

EuroSys 2025 was co-located with ASPLOS 2025 this year. Other commitments meant I (again) couldn’t stay for the whole conference, attending primarily because two students had papers in the TDIS workshop.

But happily I was able to stay for the first day of the conference – “happily” not only because it gave me a chance to catch up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a decade or more, but also because the Mirage unikernels paper which appeared at ASPLOS 2013 won one of two ASPLOS 2025 Influential Papers awards :)

This is obviously very flattering – typically doing research is necessarily its own reward because the work can seem fruitless much of the time. Even when a paper gets written and submitted it will most likely be rejected – I think EuroSys this year reported something like a 12% acceptance rate, so rejection is a priori the most likely outcome. Finally, if the paper does finally get accepted, it will most likely sink without trace – perhaps a brief flurry of interest for a few months or so, the paper gets cited a few times, and then it fades away. This seems inevitable in a reasonably fast moving field that is also growing at pace – EuroSys had ~160 attendees in 2006, growing to ~330 in the 10 years to 2016, but hitting ~1100 this year; while submissions grew from ~200 in 2019 to 696 this year.

So to win an award recognising that others feel a paper actually had some influence is rare, and makes me very happy :) At the same time, it reinforces a couple of lessons that I really should’ve internalised by now.

The first is that papers inevitably get better for thoughtful considered feedback from experts a step or several away from the work – so drafts should be produced in plenty of time and distributed to anyone who’s willing to take the time for feedback. In the case of this paper the previous failed submission to OSDI 2012 had, let’s say, reviews of mixed quality. But one stood out, from Jon Howell (who signs his reviews so I know it was him), who gave us a firm “reject” which (in retrospect) was actually fairly well-deserved but in an incredibly constructive way. To paraphrase him slightly, the work was interesting but the paper was crap – and here’s how to rewrite it so it makes sense. We basically did what he said, ASPLOS accepted it, and the rest is now history. (Over a decade ago, good grief.)

The second is that I simply cannot predict whether any research I’m doing is actually going to turn out to have any valued. The only other equivalent award I’ve had was an INFOCOM 2024 Test of Time award for our 2012 paper on a system called Thinkair, about mobile-code offload from devices to the cloud. That paper had received considerably more than just one rejection prior to acceptance, and if I recall my final contribution correctly, I recommended not submitting it to INFOCOM as I didn’t think we’d done enough to address previous review comments.

Shows what I know. But then, how boring would life be without a little ignorance… :)