Slashdot Mirror
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.)"
They probably used automated reviewing software - the computers are conspiring against us! Next thing you know we'll have autogenerated legislation and automated reviews for congressmen to vote on. How long till we have automaton congressmen voting for autogenerated legislation with pork provisions for "free storage enhancement" for their cronies?? OMG! :)
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
...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...
Let me be the first to say that random material implies a review board that is not at odds with itself. Interestingly, researchers are able to better understand material used in conjunction with algorithmic development and first principles engineering, which does not suggest a relationship between the reader and any given node.
Furthermore, citations may be employed to enhance this phenomenon when used together with LaTeX and multiples of knowledge.
FYI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
This SCIgen system quite resembles how many undergrads I have seen write papers for many of their classes, not just computer science.
When asked to comment on the news story, the paper's author is quoted as saying: "How does Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference make you feel?"
As we seek the preponderance of false results loosely coupling the precipitate with the bandwidth, we limit latency at all costs.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
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.
I For One.. Do not welcome our new computer-generated overlords.
... our new computer-generated overlords do not welcome you.
Again? Didn't they come out with software to detect this sort of thing last time it happened?
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.'
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."
...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 a conference not a journal. CS journals do go through multiple revisions, conference acceptance usually don't go through any. If any, they go through atmost one, which may or may not be compulsory.
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.
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
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Maybe the really pathetic thing about this story isn't the fake paper getting through, but rather the inane nature of the other real papers.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
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.
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This sounds like a good way to filter journals which are lax with their standards. It might also weed out peers who are too lazy (or stupid) to contribute to the process.
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.
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 first person to show me how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce wins an Internet.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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.
assignment != equality != identity
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.
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Granted, there's no 'A' to point at and say 'RTFA', but the summary says the paper was reviewed for the conference.
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.
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.
Don't criticize it, legalize it. Why not have an IEEE conference on Software-Generated Papers?
It may sound wacky, but it will probably solicit plenty of entries.
Hmmm ... so then the peer reviewers would also have to be Software-Generated. And Software-Generated attendees?
I can see the host convention center manager saying, "These computer folks seem to get kookier every day."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It is enough to check the abstract (or better, just its last phrease is enough):
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.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
HOW DA CONVERTERS CAN BE APPLIED TO E-COMMERCE?!?!?!?
For the layman, this abstract reads like this: "We know that corn dogs are built with the assumption that Obama is the next president of the US and not of China. In fact, most scholars believe that children should not be given a lawn mower in school. Now we study how banana peels can be used to paint your house"
how long until
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.
I'm serious. I've had three papers rejected by IEEE, and they except one that came out of a hidden markov model? That seriously pisses me off.
I think we know why your paper was rejected.
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.
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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.
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DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
The abstract is incomprehensible gibberish with no common thread except "we love non sequiturs". I doubt the rest of the article is much better.