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Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference
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.)"
...that peer reviewed journals (at least in computer science) are crap. 1) peer review is an old boys network, 2) people don't look at substance, they look for fancy buzzwords of the month and equations that look hard (you're rewarded for the more convoluted your paper is!), and 3) the way the system is setup, 99% of what is published is crap...people at universities and labs are forced to produce as many publications as possible to get promoted. It would be unfair of me to say that all of it is useless, but it's definitely inefficient. Look at where the great ideas in computer science and software development come today...they come from the community through things like open source (e.g. Linux, BitTorrent, etc). The academic community just rides on their coattails...
This SCIgen system quite resembles how many undergrads I have seen write papers for many of their classes, not just computer science.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Scigen
Does this program pass the Turing Test?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The links from the wikipedia article aren't quite safe for work. Anyone watching the short film Der Schlangemann at work should at least turn down the volume, or not watch at all. Lucky for me my boss would probably just laugh.
...does this mean that those who are supposed to review such things are either incompetent or don't bother with their job, or that many "professional science" papers are actually pure bullshit, so you can't tell the difference?
This is kind-of an IEEE conference. There are core IEEE conferences, which are run by the IEEE, which this isn't. Then there are other conferences (lots of them), which the IEEE sponsors in one way or another, and indexes the proceedings of. They often see the latter as a free (or at least cheap) way of getting their name associated with something that might take off. On the other hand, as this shows, it can get their name associated in the other sort of manner as well.
This seems to be a conference in China that was just founded, which leads me to believe the IEEE (like many stock investors) was duped in a rush to get their foot in the door of the Next Big Thing In China.
Lots of organizations do something vaguely like that, although the IEEE does seem to be worse than most. Even if you look only at their own, "branded" journals (IEEE Transactions on Foo), they seem to be founding new ones ever other week, which range in quality all the way from well respected in their field, to kooky. If they aren't careful, they're going to start getting an Elsevier-level reputation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Actually, if you look at the details, this "paper" was accepted into the poster session for the conference. I've been on enough technical program committees to know that the standards for poster acceptance vary quite wildly.
At some conferences, acceptance is done first and then papers are sorted into posters and presentations purely on the basis of what mode is most suitable to the material.
In others conferences, all the rejected papers are automatically accepted as posters. Why? Because conferences have expenses and to recover expenses they need attendees. Many institutions only pay for travel and registration if their employees have papers accepted at the event. So, to allow people to attend, they have to accept more papers than they might want to. With the rise of for-profit conference organizing companies, there is even a profit motive in some cases.
There is a vigorous debate within the IEEE whether such "pity accept" papers should be allowed into IEEE Xplore -- the long term archive of papers maintained for posterity. The decision is left to the conference organizers with the idea that including obvious junk in the archive actually has relatively low social cost since nobody would ever cite it or rely on it. So who cares. Others are embarrassed to have such crap in the company of more important work.
Since the number of problem-solvers is independent of the number of problems, and problem-solvers can examine multiple solutions to the same problem, along with a limited range of solutions for many problems, you can expect the number of publications to exceed the number of problems and the number of problem-solvers. However, you are correct that merely increasing the quantity of papers (which is all the current rules do) will cause the quality to suffer. The total thought put in to N papers over a period of time t cannot exceed the total amount of thought the brain can output over time t.
Sure, natural multitaskers will be able to better exploit the total amount of thought the brain can exploit when N exceeds 1, but if N exceeds their threshold, the quality suffers. For the rest of humanity, where single-tasking is the rule, N absolutely has to be 1.
Current funding rules for academia and research labs mean that quantity is profitable, quality is not. That is exactly the wrong way to get any real work done and is partly why papers on hyperdilution and test-tube cold fusion are serious money-spinners. They take no effort to write, get cited lots (even if by debunkers - doesn't matter, since funding is a function of the absolute number of citations and not by whether the citing papers agree), and grab the attention of potential external sponsors who couldn't tell a good paper from a confetti'd dingo's kidneys.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I am so glad that someone has gone ahead and done this to expose what an embarrassment the IEEE review system really is. A few months ago, I submitted a paper to the Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (http://www.ieee-wcnc.org/) which is also an IEEE conference. Since I had entered my research interests and since I had submitted a paper here, naturally I was also assigned some papers to review. Most of the papers I got were of extremely poor quality. By that I mean that besides the content being absolute rubbish, the authors could not even make their papers to conform to submission standards. In contrast, the paper we had written had gone through 4 stages of internal review and aside from me (the PhD student), the other three authors were very respected members of the community. I am not lying when I say that our paper was several orders of magnitude better than any of the ones I was given to review. Yet, when the deadline of notification for acceptance came, our paper had been rejected. All of us were shell-shocked when we saw the reviews. Three of the reviewers had not written a single comment but had just given haphazard grades. One of the reviewers seemed to be pissed off for some reason. I quote: "this paper is lying" was one of his scientific opinions of our paper. Out of 7 reviews, only one contained comments that were coherent, to the point and sensible. Another thing is that you can see when the reviewer was assigned the paper and when he reviewed it. Three of my reviewers literally took around 2 minutes to review my paper. How can you assess months of someone's work in 2 minutes. It just makes me so angry thinking about it! The problem with IEEE conferences is that they receive so many papers that the academics who are assigned to review them delegate them to their PhD and master's students. PhD students are fine, but anything lower than that is a complete travesty. The system itself is fundamentally flawed. If they could just reject papers that do not conform to the submission guidelines, IEEE could save themselves at least a third of the work. This way, people would have less papers to review thus being able to give each paper more of their attention. After all, this is someone's career here.
At least Social Text wasn't a peer-reviewed publication. IEEE doesn't seem to have that excuse.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Another thing that makes it different is that this is a no-name startup conference in China with editors and a program committee nobody has ever heard of, whereas Sokal got his paper accepted to a well-known journal in the field, edited by some of its luminaries. If this paper had gotten accepted to say, Communications of the ACM, and fooled Donald Knuth into thinking it was genuine, it would've been more analogous.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is the solution, you're exactly right! Use generated papers as the way to score whether reviewers are doing their job well or not. A short write-up on the idea; it shouldn't be too hard to automate since most submissions are electronic nowadays.
The best phrase from this paper is:
"Continuing with this rationale, we removed more 2GHz Intel 386s from the KGB's game-theoretic
cluster to understand our desktop machines."
It's good to know that, in the study of e-commerce simulation, one can always depend on 2 GHz 386s from the KGB game-theory cluster. This was clearly needed to understand a desktop.
I'll find out soon enough if the IEEE watermarks the PDFs with the username and IP of the original downloader - since here's a download link.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays,
Satan Claws.
The abstract is incomprehensible gibberish with no common thread except "we love non sequiturs". I doubt the rest of the article is much better.