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Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference

Posted by kdawson on from the compelling-principles-of-electrical-engineering dept.

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.)"

13 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. proving my point... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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...

    1. Re:proving my point... by caerwyn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Just for an example of poor quality (though opposite to your comments about convolution), I was once handed a paper (I don't recall the journal or author, unfortunately, as this was several years ago) on fault detection in distributed networks.

      The entire point of the paper was "If you send a request and you don't get a response back for a while, something probably went wrong." I read over it a couple times, hoping I was missing something that actually had substance to it. No luck.

      That said, I don't think the academic community is entirely full of crap, or just riding on coattails. I do think a lot of that goes on, though, and I think it really pollutes the overall signal/noise ratio in the related journals- and from a distance, it does tend to just blur together into "crap".

      --
      The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
    2. Re:proving my point... by PingPongBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There is a lot of crap, I agree, because many profs save time by having students write papers, and when you talk about riding coattails, the profs just put their name along with the student's name on the sometimes quite long list of authors. On the surface, there is a "structured" way of writing a paper so that it passes muster. After that, deep thoughts are typically not described in detail. The reader is "supposed to" have enough IQ or education to follow along.

      Is it an old boys network? Perhaps, but I don't really think so. The system works, as in it is maintainable rather than functional, rather than perfect, because there is enough money to keep below average students. After all, if you have only above average students, you will end up with below average students, below a larger average, but then you need above average profs and above average budgets. Just as subprime was aided by mandates to provide poor people with access to housing, universities have to admit bad performance.

      The problem is a lot of writers tend to gravitate to lower standards, partly to save time on writing, and partly because the system makes papers suck so badly that it becomes easy to become published - it's an artificial way of paving the road to academic recognition. Reviewers are inundated with garbage. They can't reject as many as they want because they have a "quota". Also, some people need an incentive to become researchers, trying to achieve something risky, and they aren't going to stay in the field if their papers keep getting rejected.

      There has to be a happy ending - if you want to figure out something, don't just search the literature. The exact answer isn't there. You have to solve the problems yourself and skim the papers for little insights into techniques or results.

      --
      Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
    3. Re:proving my point... by wintermind · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not a computer scientist, so YMMV, but I frequently act as a peer reviewer for several agricultural journals. We have no quota with respect to acceptance or rejection, and are not compensated monetarily or otherwise for our service as reviewers. I've rejected papers before, and it seems like I've rejected more as time goes on. I've even had a couple of my own papers rejected -- not every paper is a winner. One thing I have noticed is that I review for a journal with a very high impact rating, and there has been a noticeable increase in mediocre-quality papers as people chase the impact rating.

  2. Sadly... by KarrdeSW · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This SCIgen system quite resembles how many undergrads I have seen write papers for many of their classes, not just computer science.

  3. Nothing new by gzipped_tar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Scigen

    Does this program pass the Turing Test?

    --
    Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
    1. Re:Nothing new by Iamthecheese · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I should think that journal peer review, done properly, is a far better turing test.

      --
      If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
  4. It makes me wonder... by RyoShin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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?

    1. Re:It makes me wonder... by Gribflex · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I took a grad level course at the end of my degree in which the prof tried to subtly communicate this to the grad students.

      Each week we had to read and write a short review on a paper that had been peer reviewed and accepted into some CS or Eng journal somewhere. The topics were pretty broad, but all had something to do with the internet, or communication (the focus of the course).

      At the end of the course, the professor revealed that he had purposely selected papers such that one third were considered today to be 'good' papers, one third were considered to be valid, but poorly written, and one third were considered to be pure bunk but well written.

      He then posted a graph showing how people commented on each of the papers.

      Not surprisingly, nearly every student reviewed all of the papers in a positive light.

      I'm pretty sure that the professor was trying to teach a bit humility to the grad students. He also succeeded in proving "...that those who are supposed to review [the papers] 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?"

  5. kind-of IEEE by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  6. Not a robot conspiracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not a robot conspiracy by LaskoVortex · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, if you look at the details, this "paper" was accepted into the poster session for the conference.

      Most poster sessions consist of abstracts that are *rejected* for a speaking slot. They usually don't need to pass any more muster than to be properly formatted. A stylesheet takes care of that--no AI needed. The final say after rejection for a speaking slot basically comes down to an administrative assistant's being able to know which side is up and to have enough room in the left margin for binding. The idea is that a poster session attendee will have a liver presenter in front of the poster to explain the poorly written abstract.

      --
      Just callin' it like I see it.
  7. Review system flawed by zbharucha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.