Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference 235
schlangemann writes "Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, 'CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.' Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)"
Sokal affair Redux? (Score:4, Informative)
FYI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [wikipedia.org]
Re:Editing (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read the paper? I'll just give you the abstract and let you decide for yourself if there was heavy editing ...
"Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bitarchitectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce."
Re:proving my point... (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know any professors that proflic. That would take a lot of graduate students... An associate professor can typically count on getting tenure with 3 top tier publications at most institutions.
Re:proving my point... (Score:5, Informative)
It's called pipelining. You're doing multiple pieces of research over long periods in parallel. Large parts of the research and dog work are handed off to grad-student units to be completed and then introduced back into the main pipeline.
Then the professor goes to the toilet and squeezes out another paper while reading the results of the grad student's dog work.
Re:Editing (Score:4, Informative)
Reminds me of the Sokal affair (Score:4, Informative)
Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why is this shocking? (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this shocking?
1) Because a completely gibberish paper was reviewed and accepted by human reviewers, who presumably have expertise in computer science.
2) Because IEEE is an old, respected organization that sponsors respectable CS conferences (e.g., FOCS).
CS is much more prolific (Score:5, Informative)
A grad student wouldn't even be hired as a tenure-track professor with only 3 top-tier publications at most institutions in CS. This is partly because CS mainly uses a conference publication model, not a journal model: you distribute your work in 6- to 10-page bite-sized pieces. You might sometimes collect some of these into a 30-page journal article, but often people skip that step entirely (why bother re-writing-up your research when it's already out there in some form).
A grad student looking to be competitive as a hire at a top-tier research university typically is expected to have 4-5 publications in top-tier conferences or journals (journals don't actually usually get more cache; in some areas, they get less). This is somewhat mitigated if you're in an area that only has one, very competitive top conference: so a graphics grad student obviously doesn't need 5 SIGGRAPH papers to be a competitive candidate. But an AI student should have a good smattering of AAAI and IJCAI papers, plus a few in the top tier conference of their specific area (ICML, IUI, AAMAS, etc.). A professor looking to get tenure at a top institution typically will have 10-30 publications at such venues.
related, but somewhat different (Score:4, Informative)
These seem to be testing different things. One of Sokal's claims, which he intended to demonstrate, was that gibberish and "postmodernist" academic writing are indistinguishable, even by people in the field. This was done especially through the wordplay connections of e.g. the "axiom of choice" with pro-choice politics, which is a fairly common but kind of weird tactic in a certain subset of that milieu. He more or less demonstrated that claim by his experiment especially the fact that at least one of the journal editors, months later, refused to believe that it was actually a hoax: he suggested instead that Sokal had been pressured/embarrassed into retroactively claiming a legitimate paper was a hoax, in order to avoid ridicule by the conservative physics establishment.
This paper, on the other hand, demonstrates a different academic flaw: the proliferation of low-quality, minimal-to-no-review computer-science conferences. It is quite likely that nobody actually read this paper, and that the conference was not really run as a legitimate attempt to foster academic discourse, but as a way to either get money for someone, or pad a CV line for some editors/organizers, or both.
Official Review Comment (Score:1, Informative)
.. was found on Wikipedia and is really awesome. It seems that somebody with no idea about computer science wrote this.
"This paper presents cooperative technology and classical Communication. In conclusion, the result shows that though the much-touted amphibious algorithm for the refinement of randomized algorithms is impossible, the well-known client-server algorithm for the analysis of voice-over- IP by Kumar and Raman runs in _(n) time. The authors can clearly identify important features of visualization of DHTs and analyze them insightfully. It is recommended that the authors should develop ideas more cogently, organizes them more logically, and connects them with clear transitions"
Re:Not a robot conspiracy (Score:5, Informative)
It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.
Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.
I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.
Re:NSFW (Score:2, Informative)
You do know "Der Schlange" is a German euphemism for "prick", don't you? "Der Schlange" = "The Serpent" = Trouser Snake.
Adds a little dimension of humor, nicht wahr?
Re:proving my point... (Score:3, Informative)
The publications are usually coauthored with the grad students who did the research.