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MIT Celebrates 10 Years of SCIgen Bogus CompSci Paper Generator With New Tool

Posted by samzenpus on from the making-it-all-up dept.

alphadogg writes Three MIT grads this week are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their clever SCIgen program, which randomly generates computer science papers realistic enough to get accepted by sketchy technical conferences and publishers, with a brand new tool designed to poke even more fun at such outfits. Just a bit late for April Fool's Day, the new SCIpher program from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab alums enables users to hide messages inside randomly-generated calls for papers from phony conferences whose names are so ridiculous that they sound legit. An MIT spokesman says the new tool is really just a way for geeky friends to mess with each other, whereas SCIgen pointed out major flaws in the worlds of scientific journals and conferences.

4 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. No better reason ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    An MIT spokesman says the new tool is really just a way for geeky friends to mess with each other

    Honestly, if there's a better reason to write a piece of software, I can't think of it. :-P

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:No better reason ... by GlennC · · Score: 3, Funny

      You mean...

      CFP: the HTBAI Special Issue on interposable, peer-to-peer multimedia :: CALL FOR PAPERS::

      The mission of this special issue is to provide a forum for answering the structured issues in the emulation, emulation, and investigation of flip-flop gates and Moore's Law. This symposium HTBAI is a perfect opportunity for futurists from independent graphics and modding enthusiasts from Markov steganography to come together to offer their advanced and recent reviews. The special issue also attempts at offering a seminar for answering the theoretical grand challenges in the simulation, improvement, and investigation of journaling file systems and Internet QoS. Thusly, HTBAI hopes to confirm not only that the World Wide Web and XML are entirely incompatible, but that the same is true for lambda calculus.

      Program Committee:
      Assistant Professor Kathryn Osborn, Chongqing University
      Cristopher Ritter, Kaunas Technical College
      Professor Curt Franco, University of the Republic (Uruguay)
      Vanessa Sun, University of Nantes
      Alessia Santana, University of Rostock
      Yvette Jai, Centro Universitario de Tecnologia y Arte Digital
      Alessia Yin, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
      Lorrie Reeves, Universite Internationale de Rabat

      Organizers:
      Assistant Professor Julia Lowery (University of Liege)
      Assistant Professor Pam Stone (Rappahannock Community College)
      Shelly Horton (Paris Descartes University)

      Keynote speakers:
      * Elliot Holt - Siberian Institute of Law Economics and Management
      Theoretical unification of IPv6 and the Turing machine
      * Professor Rodrick Mcclain - Hong Kong Baptist University
      A methodology for the understanding of superblocks
      * Francisco Wilkins - University of the Basque Country
      A case for scatter/gather I/O
      * Prof. Louise Bennett - Lomonosov Moscow State University
      Deconstructing containers
      * Dr. Marcos Robbins - Swinburne University of Technology
      A understanding of Web services that would allow for further study into the partition table
      * Professor Darron Grant - University of Geneva
      Deconstructing DNS
      * Mike Warner - University of California Davis
      A understanding of simulated annealing with linked lists that would allow for further study into DHTs

      HTBAI in previous years:
      Uberlandia, Brazil
      Belem, Brazil

      Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
      E-learning
      Constant-time operating systems
      Programming languages
      Mutually exclusive theory
      Steganography

      Deadlines:
      June 9, 2015: reviews due
      July 23, 2015: notification of acceptance
      August 11, 2015: final papers due
      September 5, 2015: colloquium date

      HTBAI takes abstracts on any motif related to the themes and the topics clarified above. Principally, end-users are told to submit their drafts by mail. But, half-baked revisions welcomed by this conference will be provided as revisions in the collection of the workshop on self-learning algorithms.

      --
      Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
  2. Nah... Not late at all.. by LVSlushdat · · Score: 2

    It might have been too late for the traditional world-wide April 1st "April Fools Day" but it landed smack dab on the USA's own second "April Fools Day", otherwise known as "tax day"...

    --
    THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
  3. Next year, by the first of April by russotto · · Score: 2

    A SCIGen paper responding to a SCIpher call for papers nets its "author" the Turing award. The punch line? It deserves it.