firesteelrain
11 days ago
I wrote a research paper on a novel use (or so I thought) of Linear Programming for how to optimize selection of cloud resources. The feedback I received was that application of LP in a newish area is not publishable and does not cover new ground. So don't write research papers about a new application of LP. It still covers the known and common cases of LP. No new ground to cover here.
Knowing that and thinking about it more a couple years later, what the author seems to be describing is akin to BDD approach to LP model generation as an intermediary language before you get to the actual LP model. In this case, that approach is overshadowed by the use of LLMs.
Use of LLMs to generate English language is no longer novel nor new. Therefore, any application of LLMs that do that aren't novel either.
t_mann
11 days ago
Fyi, it's quite common to have a paper rejected on the first (couple of) submission(s). With feedback along the lines of "not interesting enough", it's usually worth it trying it again somewhere else. Sounds like that venue was looking for methodological innovation within optimization, you could try it at a more domain-oriented outlet that would appreciate how your solution improves upon the SOTA for cloud resource selection.
What I'm also saying: just because you had a paper rejected once with a specific comment doesn't mean that every other paper where such a comment could vaguely fit needs to be rejected as well.
firesteelrain
11 days ago
I had several comments. I posted below but here are some
This was my first and only research paper submission under my MS in Systems Engineering. It wasn’t a requirement but the department head was impressed that any Masters student might try to submit at all.
It was to IEEE. Maybe that was hard mode? It was for a Cloud Conference in 2023.
One of the comments
“ This paper shows a linear programming problem to address cloud security. It's not clear why the LP program addresses security. Comparison with SOTA is also lacking.”
“ The paper attempts a fresh perspective on Cloud Security Decisions using a well-known approach. Unfortunately, as currently presented, it does not deliver any significant research results, and thereby its contribution is limited. The paper as formulated is closer to a vision paper -- not that it actually is -- than to a research paper. This reviewer notes the limited results. No surprises, the paper is also missing an evaluation analysis of the results.”
I had evaluation of results. I had never heard of a vision paper.
This was one of the better comments that actually provide the best feedback. The section that they mention was exceptionally long was my literature review:
“ This paper describes the idea of leveraging linear programming to determine how to allocate security resources in the cloud.
It would be better if the paper focused more on describing the proposed solution. The current description in Sec III is insufficient. First, there are many assumptions that were made to explain and formulate the linear programming for security resource allocation. These assumptions need to be explained further, e.g., to provide information on parameterizing values such as the budget and weights. Second, it would be better if the paper describes the system models based on a current cloud service provider so that the discussion is more concrete.
The implementation section can be reduced significantly, e.g., the Sec V.B. can be condensed to only show important lines of code.
There is no evaluation of the proposed solution. It is hard to assess how well the proposed solution will work without evaluating the formulation based on existing cloud service providers. Additionally, it is important to choose some baselines to compare the proposed solution.
The related work section takes 2 out of the 6 pages and feels unnecessarily long. It might be sufficient to describe how prior work solves this problem and how this paper differs.
A final remark is about the problem formulation. It is unclear what the challenges of allocating security resources are and how those challenges differ from other cloud-based resource allocation problems.”
t_mann
10 days ago
It's hard giving feedback without having seen the paper. I think you need to ask yourself how much you'd value having a peer-reviewed publication and how much effort/frustration tolerance you want to conjure up for this.
Getting it accepted might entail multiple submissions and significant extra work on top of what you've already done. The value of the bragging rights might be limited on the non-academic job market. And getting it published is still a different thing from having impact. Up to you to decide.
firesteelrain
10 days ago
Can I email you the paper?
darksaints
10 days ago
The reason why application of LP in a newish area is not really publishable is because the field of Operations Research has been doing that continuously for the past 80 years. Modeling planning problems as mathematical optimization problems has been done long before computers were capable of solving them, and convex optimization problems in particular have the most historical work put into them, due to early innovations. Optimizing selections of cloud resources in particular is so ubiquitous that those exact types of problems tend to be used as tutorials to get people up to speed for various types of solvers.
Unfortunately we have a very bad branding problem, and almost nobody who hears the name "Operations Research" can infer what we actually do from the name, let alone understand the mountains of research that we've accumulated over time.
whatever1
11 days ago
Probably you need to submit to a different journal. It is not indeed a theoretically interesting contribution but it is definitely a very interesting practical application. Many journals would welcome your contribution.
firesteelrain
11 days ago
It was to IEEE. Maybe that was hard mode? It was for a Cloud Conference in 2023.
One of the comments
“ This paper shows a linear programming problem to address cloud security. It's not clear why the LP program addresses security. Comparison with SOTA is also lacking.”
“ The paper attempts a fresh perspective on Cloud Security Decisions using a well-known approach.
Unfortunately, as currently presented, it does not deliver any significant research results, and thereby its contribution is limited.
The paper as formulated is closer to a vision paper -- not that it actually is -- than to a research paper. This reviewer notes the limited results. No surprises, the paper is also missing an evaluation analysis of the results.”
I had evaluation of results. I had never heard of a vision paper.
whatever1
11 days ago
It is not trivial to publish to CLOUD. 3/4 of papers get rejected.
For better or worse, reviewers expect a specific structure in a paper. From the comments, it seems that you did not follow the typical structure of a research publication. Unfortunately, there are no clear guidelines; it just becomes natural with reading and writing papers. A mentor with academic experience would be a valuable resource in your case; you are probably 80% there.
firesteelrain
11 days ago
I didn’t really have much guidance and sort of winged it and that was my fault.
I graduated last May and do not have any advisors any longer. I could try to rework the paper myself and fix the problems with it which I may do now that I have more time.
tptacek
11 days ago
Got a draft of it?
user
11 days ago
user
11 days ago