Corporate sponsorship of computer science conferences: trends, structural insights, and a novel approach to ranking conferences

Abstract

Corporate sponsorship is increasingly prevalent at computer science conferences. However, a quantitative understanding of this phenomenon has yet to be established, let alone insights into the interplay between academic conferences and sponsoring corporations, or how to leverage it. To fill these gaps, this study first explores the landscape of corporate sponsorship across a wide range of high-profile computer science conferences, shedding light on its evolution over a 25-year period from 2000 to 2024. The complex and expansive relationships between these conferences and their corporate sponsors are then systematically organized into a network for structural analysis and conference evaluation. Specifically, after modularity optimization, the network's topological properties are analyzed to identify key conferences and corporations that shape the overall structure, connectivity, and functionality. More importantly, this study makes the first attempt to employ a conference-corporation sponsorship network, along with a network-based ranking algorithm, to evaluate computer science conferences, introducing a new perspective on assessing their quality or reputation from the standpoint of corporate sponsorship. The proposed evaluation approach is benchmarked against three popular ranking systems, demonstrating not only its practical usefulness but also its unique ability to highlight the disparity in the attention that academia and industry direct to different fields of computer science. This paper has significant implications for scholarly communication in computer science, particularly as industry has become the primary consumer of academic research in the discipline.