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.)"
What, again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Again? Didn't they come out with software to detect this [slashdot.org] sort of thing last time it happened? [slashdot.org]
Why is this shocking? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last time I checked, there were more than half a million papers on arxiv. The number of scientific papers in the world is increasing with the rate of increase in researchers looking for jobs, not with the rate at which problems are being discovered or solved.
Since the currency of the research community is number of publications, and since administrative sections of universities have little or no competence in judging an academic's competence save statistics on papers published, why is it surprising to find that people publish low-quality work?
I am reminded of the joke about string theory, `The number of papers in string theory is increasing faster than the speed of light. This is not a problem, though, since no information is actually transferred.'
Re:proving my point... (Score:3, Insightful)
A professor will typically publish around 500 papers. That's about one paper every two weeks. I cannot see how anyone can produce a high quality paper, including doing the research, in two weeks, every two weeks.
Re:Sokal affair Redux? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not especially like the Sokal affair. Its pretty obvious here that no-one read the paper.
Consider, the first paragraph from the paper:
The synthesis of ïber-optic cables is a natural quagmire. While such a hypothesis is entirely a theoretical ambition, it rarely conïicts with the need to provide operating systems to computational biologists. Similarly,for example, many methodologies measure vacuum tubes. The notion that hackers worldwide interfere with context-free grammar is largely bad. The synthesis of checksums would tremendously improve mobile information.
or this:
"We performed a quantized emulation on Intelâ(TM)s mobile telephones to prove the work of Italian mad scientist J. Dongarra."
What does this really say? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:proving my point... (Score:2, Insightful)
A professor will typically publish around 500 papers. That's about one paper every two weeks. I cannot see how anyone can produce a high quality paper, including doing the research, in two weeks, every two weeks.
Be careful with numbers. That 500 figure you're quoting includes all papers with a given professors name on it, including (but not limited to):
- pretty much every paper produced by one of their postgrad students.
- pretty much every paper produced by one of their postdocs.
- pretty much every paper produced by one of their research assistants.
- repeat for political allies, old friends, the janitor, anyone else who is willing to allow them to give minimal input and a name in the title...
- and their own papers.
Get the picture?
Re:I For One... (Score:5, Insightful)
So I for one welcome our new document-producing computer overlords, which is just as well as they already seem to be used as part of Slashdot's editorial process.
is this a quality conference? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do not personally know this conference, I've never attended or tried to get something published there. But I am a computer scientist, working in academia, and I always write my papers for conferences that are specific to my specialization (computer/graphics, CAD etc). This conference is so general in the topics that it accepts, I would expect the quality of papers (and therefore the review process) to be quite low. This is a conference you would send your paper to if you cannot get it accepted at a better conference.
I think it would be much harder to get computer generated bla bla accepted at a conference on a specific topic.
Why does IEEE sponsor such crap conferences? Because it's big business. Easy money. Other have said it here already: that's the problem with science these days, it's all about quantity, not quality. Hit your university board over the head with this stuff.
Re:Editing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:related, but somewhat different (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but the effect is the same. A nonsense paper got accepted by a prestigious institution. The only thing that makes the mirror-image of this nerds-get-a-dose-of-their-own-medicine-hoax incomplete, is that it wasn't perpetrated by a professor of literature. But that's all. Gloating over the Sokal affair by science students is from now on off-limits, you could say.
Re:proving my point... (Score:3, Insightful)
"He's successful because he applies for grant money, hires quality staff and administers multiple projects thanks to his years of expertise."
So... he's a good and productive administrator? I can see being annoyed at hogging the publishing limelight, but it's pretty hard to fault someone for being a good leader.
Nuturing young researchers (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's another factor to consider: skilled scientists do not appear out of the ether. Nor do they emerge fully formed from the head of Zeus. More often than not, they're smart (but inexperienced) young folks. They may not be native English speakers, either.
Workshops and conferences can fill a nurturing role. Poster sessions play a big role: a little encouragement and hopefully some productive feedback during the session will help them become better researchers. Of course, recognizing substantial research contributions is extremely important, but the two goals are not in conflict.
(slightly off-topic rant): The press likes to complain about how millions of dollars go to fund "ridiculous" research... like studying the DNA of bears in Alaska. From their depiction, you might think the money was being distributed to the bears by being covered with honey and shoved into hollowed trees. No, that money is going to fund graduate students, creating the next generation of researchers who will be there to drive our technology forward. The study of bear DNA might actually be really interesting, but even if it turns out to be unremarkable, those dollars still helped produce new researchers.
Re:Review system flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, the fact that you reviewed a couple really awful papers has little bearing on whether your paper will be accepted or not. Now, if you could claim that these awful papers got accepted, while yours was rejected, you might have something to say. But if those papers were also rejected, your statements about them have absolutely no merit.
Also, sometimes you get bad luck with reviewers. You might get reviewers who think the entire premise behind your research is crap, or ones who don't like your group for whatever reason. Sometimes you get one who just happened to be having a bad day, and wanted to find fault with your paper. The hope is that with enough reviewers, it is unlikely that you will get only crappy reviewers. If that does happen, I'm sorry, try again. Also, don't put too much stock in the timestamps given. Those could have been modified for any number of reasons. It's highly unlikely that a reviewer would submit final reviews 2 minutes after getting the paper. Chances are good they'd save the paper, and wait a few weeks before looking at them right before the deadline. The only time I'd spend 2 minutes reviewing a paper is if it was either a) Completely unreadable (like the computer generated gibberish), or b) it was obviously plagiarizing other papers. In those cases, it isn't worth more than 2 minutes of my time to give it a valid review.
Hopefully next time you have better luck with reviewers, in my experience I tend to get some informed comments back on my papers that can help guide changes I want to make whether it gets accepted or not.
Phil
Re:Not a robot conspiracy (Score:4, Insightful)
For you lazy folks, here's the garbage abstract:
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.
The paper was generated by the SCIgen project at MIT. According to , the program is meant to generate garbage. [mit.edu]
Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.
When I read the Slashdot summary, I totally missed the point. The point is that some MIT folks have created a garbage paper generator and are mocking the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.
Re:CS is much more prolific (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading this I am more glad that I decided to go to grad school last year to avoid this entire economic tsunami. At least my paycheck is safe for a little while and continue to publish may be 100 papers a day to advance our scientific research.