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
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.
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?"
I For One.. Do not welcome our new computer-generated overlords.
... our new computer-generated overlords do not welcome you.
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.'
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.
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."
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.
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 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?"
It was probably an attempt to satisfy the author's "[citation needed]" request in Wikipedia.
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.